Why this investor believes US-developed ChatGPT could spur a gold rush for Chinese firms able to turn ideas into products
- ChatGPT is a conversational AI chatbot that Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled in November to much fanfare
- Lighthouse Capital says while ChatGPT is US-developed, local firms will likely capitalise by turning innovation into usable products quickly
The furore created by San Francisco start-up OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot has set off another round in the artificial intelligence (AI) arms race among global tech giants.
And while ChatGPT originated in the US, Chinese boutique investment bank Lighthouse Capital is betting that the ability of Chinese companies to turn innovative concepts into usable products quickly, could give them a leg up.
“While [many] innovations come from overseas markets in the first place, Chinese companies have the capability to turn innovations into excellent products,” Xie Xuzhang, executive director at Lighthouse Capital, said in an interview with the Post on Wednesday.
“In the long run we believe a lot of Chinese companies with tech and product strength will emerge to become industry leaders [in this space],” said Xie, adding that local companies would certainly dominate the domestic market due to their access to Chinese text materials and compliance knowledge.
ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-Trained Transformer, is a conversational bot that Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled in November. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.
The bot can understand sophisticated prompts and generates human-like responses. It has continued to learn and improve its responses since coming on line, interacting with people and receiving more information. The enthusiastic public response to ChatGPT has spurred Google and Microsoft to bake similar technology into their new product offerings.