ChatGPT has sparked a new round of soul-searching among China’s tech heavyweights over how far the country lags in AI
- Baidu’s founder Robin Li, who launched ChatGPT rival Ernie Bot this month, sees a technology gap of months while others see years
- The capabilities of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI bot and the updated GPT4 have shocked China’s tech professionals into action
China’s technology entrepreneurs have started to debate how far the country lags behind OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT and its updated GPT4 large language model (LLM), with Baidu’s founder Robin Li seeing a gap of months while Qihoo 360 Zhou Hongyi founder sees a gap of about “two or three years”.
Baidu’s Li, who this month unveiled Ernie Bot – the search engine’s rival to artificial intelligence (AI) powered ChatGPT, said in a live broadcast at Geekpark, a community for Chinese technology professionals, that Ernie Bot was only about “one or two months” behind ChatGPT.
“According to analysis by [our] team, we are currently at about the level ChatGPT was at in January,” Li said.
Zhou of cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360 told the government-organised China Development Forum that China’s own LLM technology is “two to three years behind” OpenAI’s GPT4. However, Zhou said that China should keep investing in the technology as the direction is clear and “there are no insurmountable obstacles”.
The capabilities of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI bot and the updated GPT4 have shocked China’s tech professionals into action, with many rushing to launch rival technologies. Li said Baidu was under “huge pressure and a sense of crisis” after seeing ChatGPT and felt that the “the gap [between China] and leading international levels [in the field] has widened”.