Welcome to Chinese-style ChatGPT

AP/TIMOTHY D EASLEY

William Kelley tries to Find Bots in Donnie Piercey's class at Stonewall Elementary, in Lexington, Kentucky, USA, Monday (6/2/2023). Students in their respective classes summarized texts about boxing champion and Kentucky icon Muhammad Ali, then tried to figure out which summaries were written by classmates and which were written by chatbots. Chatbot is ChatGPT's new artificial intelligence tool that can generate everything from essays to term papers in seconds.

The euphoria of the emergence of the generative artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT since 2022 still resonates today. People are still discussing this technology. Then, they ask, how will China compete in the arena of artificial intelligence technology?

A number of Chinese startups operating in the field of generative artificial intelligence (AI) have received large funding amid a number of venture capital companies putting a brake on disbursement of funds. Venture investment is really sluggish. Since three months ago, as many as four start-up businesses received funding, bringing their valuation to between 1.2 billion US dollars and 2.5 billion US dollars.

The Financial Times report at the end of last week stated that the four large startups were Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, Minimax, and 01.ai. They are gathering talented talents and trying to make great products. To develop this technology, they must obtain approval from the Chinese government. So far, China has given approval to 40 startups.

They rely on Tsinghua University as a repository for talents in the field of artificial intelligence. In addition, they call on talents who have experience in various global technology companies. The founder of Zhipu AI, Yang Zhilin, served as an intern at Google Brain AI and Meta AI. The presence of artificial intelligence-based startups has really broken the funding ice that has barely moved.

The main driver of enthusiasm for developing artificial intelligence technology in China seems to be that the country does not want to be left behind by their rival, the United States. They also want to show excellence in that field even though not much information has been released yet. Some start-up businesses still cover the number of funding rounds and funds obtained on the grounds that they are protected from competition against competitors in obtaining superior talents.

AFP PHOTO /STR/CHINA OUT

Ke Jie (left), a Go player from China, is currently competing in the first match of a duel against Google's artificial intelligence program, AlphaGO, in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, China.

Also read: Artificial Intelligence is Increasingly Unstoppable

Signs that China wants to gain a place in the generative artificial intelligence game were detected in the middle of last year. The company Baidu has launched a ChatGPT rival called Ernie Bot to the public. The move is being called a big leap for the country's technology sector as it aims to cash in on the artificial intelligence gold rush.

From other sources, it was mentioned that Baidu CEO Robin Li said during the launch that Ernie Bot can answer various general knowledge questions, summarize information from web pages, and produce images based on previously recorded data.

Signs that China wants to gain a place in the generative artificial intelligence competition were detected in the middle of last year.

Around the same time, a report from Aljazeera mentioned that the Chinese government had introduced new regulations in August for the development of AI aimed at enabling them to stay competitive with ChatGPT, OpenAI, and Microsoft while tightly controlling the dissemination of information on the internet.

Challenge

Will this technology run smoothly in its implementation? Especially with the possibility of clashes between the Chinese Government's regulations and the innovation of artificial intelligence development itself.

Artificial intelligence platforms in China will face challenges that are not the case for companies outside China that are racing to compete freely with ChatGPT. The Wired page states that it is basically difficult to resist the tendency of chatbots to fabricate or "hallucinate" facts. Platforms like these sometimes say things that are unpleasant or inappropriate.

Is China ready to face such a situation? On the other hand, will the development of artificial intelligence be able to solve the "chaos" on platforms like the one mentioned above? Meanwhile, companies like Baidu must also comply with the government's strict censoring guidelines for online content.

”Baidu will face a tension between making chatbots that are useful and making chatbots that are compliant with China's speech controls,” said Matt Sheehan, a researcher at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies the AI ​​industry China. He was skeptical they would be able to create a general-purpose chatbot that couldn't be tricked by users into making remarks that would be unacceptable in China.

KOMPAS/LUKI AULIA

Robots operated with artificial intelligence (AI) technology were showcased at the AI booth at the China International Import Expo on Sunday (11/6/2022) in Shanghai.

Ernie Bot's ability is not yet comparable to ChatGPT. Moreover, OpenAI has introduced a significant improvement, called GPT-4, in the AI technology that supports ChatGPT. The Chinese artificial intelligence platform's strides are still far behind, but in various cases they can surpass and be ahead. These signs are already visible from Ernie Bot which has 200 million users and has started selling paid access.

Baidu will face a tension between making chatbots that are useful and making chatbots that are compliant with Chinese speech controls.

Therefore, the emergence of China's ChatGPT has made the competition for developing generative artificial intelligence more lively. Technology companies in the United States are facing tough opponents. They can develop the technology in a short time. Although it is still only used domestically in China, it will surely expand to the global market in the future.

The benefit is that the public will have several alternative platforms. The price to pay for subscription access will be more affordable. Unfortunately, Indonesian society only becomes spectators. It seems that there are no capable domestic developers to compete in this field. We might just become consumers again.