Amid China’s AI investment fever, a debate on whether start-ups can make money from ChatGPT-style services
- An online back-and-forth between a venture capitalist and a well-known Chinese entrepreneur has stoked debate about the business potential of LLMs
- Experts say it may be too expensive for start-ups to build LLMs from scratch, but companies can focus on developing applications for the technology
Is there still room for start-ups to profit from ChatGPT-style services in China? That question has stirred heated debate among Chinese entrepreneurs and investors after the launch of OpenAI’s chatbot sparked a wave of artificial intelligence (AI) investment.
With ChatGPT and Google’s Bard unlikely to be available in China due to the country’s strict content regulation, local technology firms have been racing to introduce similar services.
As of May, China had at least 79 large AI models with more than 1 billion parameters – a measure of the sophistication of a model – according to a recent report published by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China, a government research agency.
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Is China’s technology falling behind in the race for its own ChatGPT?
But the jury is out on whether start-ups have a good chance of profiting from the new AI technology.
Allen Zhu Xiaohu, managing partner at GSR Ventures, a company that invests in early-stage start-ups, said in a conference in Beijing that ChatGPT may be a curse for AI start-ups, as the service is so powerful that it can perform better than many of their existing functions, according to Chinese media reports.
In response, Fu Sheng, a well-known Chinese entrepreneur and CEO of internet company Cheetah Mobile, described Zhu in a comment as “fearlessly ignorant” about the business potential that ChatGPT can unlock.
Fu and Zhu did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this article.