ChatGPT has grabbed headlines but developing a Chinese competitor will face censorship, cost and data challenges
- China’s ruling Communist Party has always strictly controlled the flow of political and social discussion within the country
- Aside content and compliance, the costs of running an AI chat bot can run into millions of dollars per day based on high volume of queries
As China’s tech professionals returned to work after the week-long Lunar New Year holiday in January, the industry was immediately abuzz with talk about a new AI chat bot from San Francisco-based start-up OpenAI.
ChatGPT, a conversational bot that Microsoft-backed OpenAI unveiled in November, is able to understand sophisticated questions and give surprisingly humanlike text responses.
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.
Mainland users skirted the usual restrictions to set up accounts via VPN, and attempted to use the bot in various ways, including as a movie critic, career counsellor, for health and investment advice and in some cases as a dream interpreter.
The Chinese government also took note. A recent white paper published by the municipal technology bureau of Beijing – a city which is home to the largest cluster of Chinese AI start-ups – pledged to support local companies in developing ChatGPT rivals.