Microsoft China executive warns of wasteful ChatGPT-like investments amid ‘fanatical’ interest in the technology
- A strategy of ‘burning money to hire thousands, or tens of thousands’ of people to throw at the problem may not work, according to Wei Qing
- Wei’s views echo those of Charles Zhang, founder and CEO of news portal Sohu.com, who said ChatGPT has been in development for years
A senior executive at Microsoft China has warned that the country’s “fanaticism” over ChatGPT and artificial intelligence (AI) could lead to hasty investments, resulting in losses of capital, time and talent.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s conversational bot ChatGPT spurred a frenzy of interest when it was launched last November, with tech companies in China particularly keen to catch up in the field. However, Wei Qing, chief technology officer at Microsoft China, said that ChatGPT was the culmination of long-term research and could not be replicated by splashing out cash.
“Most people only saw the meteoric and exponential growth of [ChatGPT], and we might think this is how [products] should grow,” he said in a speech at an AI-themed conference in Beijing on Tuesday.
OpenAI has invested many years of effort to bring the technology to market, yet people only see the “tip of the iceberg” and not everything “under the water”, Wei added.
Microsoft: China approves plan to buy game maker Activision Blizzard
A strategy of “burning money to hire thousands, or tens of thousands” of people to throw at the problem may not work, Wei said.
Wei did not name any Chinese companies in his speech. ChatGPT, which is not available in China and is unlikely to be approved for use given Beijing’s intolerance of uncensored information, has prompted a number of China Big Tech firms and start-ups to launch their own versions of the AI chatbot.
The frenzied state of some ChatGPT-like product launches could “squander large amounts of capital, time, and talent without yielding desired results”, he said.
Wei, a Microsoft veteran of more than two decades, added that people tend to overlook that short-term exponential growth is still linear growth when viewed over a longer horizon.
Founded in late 2015, OpenAI largely remained under the radar as it developed several iterations of generative pre-trained transformers (GPT), until the release of ChatGPT last November and then its updated GPT 4 model in March this year, which propelled the technology to worldwide acclaim. Microsoft initially made a US$1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019, but that grew to more than US$13 billion by early 2023.
Wei’s views echo those of Charles Zhang, founder and CEO of news portal Sohu.com, who pointed out that ChatGPT has been under development for years, in a process that involves resources “from servers and computing power to knowledge base and tagging”.
Amazon to add ChatGPT-like search to its online store
“Companies that have no such capabilities but choose to follow suit will squander a lot of their resources,” Zhang told an industry forum last Thursday.
Still, Chinese companies from search engine giant Baidu and e-commerce powerhouse and South China Morning Post owner Alibaba Group Holding, to AI audio specialist iFlytek, have jumped on the bandwagon to offer local versions of ChatGPT.
Liu Cong, vice-president and head of research at iFlytek, who spoke after Wei at Tuesday’s event, reiterated the company’s goal that its Spark Desk chatbot, launched earlier this month, would exceed ChatGPT’s Chinese language ability and have caught up with its English ability by October.
