OpenAI’s ChatGPT took the AI world by storm a year ago and China is still playing catch-up as US piles on the pressure
- The world changed in November 2022 with the launch of San Francisco-based OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot ChatGPT
- China’s crowded market of more than 100 LLMs is constrained by lack of access to advanced chips, which curtails computing power
At a study session of the Politburo five years ago, President Xi Jinping said artificial intelligence (AI) was a strategic priority and that China must occupy the “commanding heights” in core AI systems to achieve global technology supremacy.
The Chinese leader’s rhetoric was backed by a strong performance on the field. The country was competitive with the US from the 2010s onwards, outperforming in some areas such as facial recognition. In 2017, China published its “Next Generation Artificial intelligence Development Plan”, which laid out a goal to ultimately become the global leader in AI by 2030.
However, the world changed in November 2022 with the launch of San Francisco-based OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a generative AI chatbot based on the GPT3.5 large language model (LLM). OpenAI is backed by US tech giant Microsoft.
LLMs are deep-learning AI algorithms that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate content using very large data sets.
While the arrival of ChatGPT has spurred a frenzy among Chinese tech companies to develop domestic rivals, from Baidu’s Ernie Bot to Alibaba Group Holding’s LLM Tongyi Qianwen, the field is still led by US companies, with OpenAI subsequently releasing GPT-4 Turbo and US giant Google making its mark with Bard. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.