He said that in the future, ChatGPT would be not only a chatbot but an artificial intelligence assistant revolutionising life from the way information was distributed to human-computer interaction, “allowing everyone to become more creative on the shoulders of AI”.

Liu said that while research institutions and businesses in China had released a number of large language models, they still needed to work out systematic issues such as general-purpose pre-training and reinforcement learning from human feedback.

To quickly close the gap with the US, state-level special projects should be set up to support a long-term, steady innovation system to bring together industry and academia – including newly established national laboratories – to tackle the development and upgrade of cognitive intelligence models, he said

Meanwhile, the country could quickly do a series of pilot projects and apply such models to the education, medical, and legal systems, he said.

To develop and run China’s own large language models, the nation must strengthen its software and hardware foundations, such as information storage, computing power and even operating systems, and become more self-reliant in these technologies.

He said that just as ChatGPT’s developers trained their system on massive internet resources and electronic books from American public libraries, China should establish a national data resource platform to gather and share basic, high-quality data needed for building large models.

Liu said China should also research the possible social disruptions AI might induce, including job losses, and how the government could guide such transitions.

ChatGPT has been a hot topic during this year’s “two sessions”, the country’s biggest annual political gathering.

Wang also raised ethical concerns, saying that China must “wait and see” when it came to catching up with ChatGPT, as such large language models often resulted in unpredictable or inaccurate responses.