Source: Wall Street Journal

Author: Karen Hao, Shen Lu

ChatGPT's explosion caused a wave in China.After the crown disease epidemic and the two -year regulatory rectification, China Science and Technology Corporation was looking for new sources of growth.

Search engine operators Bai, e -commerce giant Alibaba and Social Media Group Tencent have announced their investment in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) chat robots similar to ChatGPT.Other Chinese companies have also followed the trend. In recent weeks, their stock price has soared sharply, which has caused official media to warn this round of speculative rise.ChatGPT is not yet open to the Chinese market.

AI and experts in the Chinese technology industry said that Chinese companies investing in the generation AI technology in the early days will now have the most hoped to create their own version of Chatgpt.Articles, images, and artworks generated by this technology are like human works.However, it is difficult for many other companies to catch up with the latest wave of technology and business applications.

Although there are several leading AI companies in China, many of them focus on applications such as computer vision and monitoring.ChatGPT requires tools and knowledge from another AI sub -domain -natural language processing (NLP).

Chinese companies also face geopolitical and review -related obstacles, including how to obtain advanced process chips listed as the target of the US export control, and try to deal with the strict review rules of the Chinese government.

Nevertheless, powerful companies will quickly become wave -ranges.Matt Sheehan, a researcher at the Carnegie International Heping Research Institute, said that for these companies, there is no substantial obstacle to prevent China from catching up and re -creation or establishing a better model.

ChatGPT's creator OPENAI prohibits users in China from creating accounts on their chat robots, but many people have made a different approach to use VPN or spend a few dollars on the e -commerce platform to buy accounts by bypass this obstacle.ChatGPT supports Chinese. Its eye -opening, unexpected, sometimes wrong answers have become a hot topic in Chinese social media.Some consumers strongly demand the launch of domestic alternatives.

In January this year, reports on Baidu's related plans surfaced.The company plans to integrate its own AI chat robot humanities in March into its search engine.Baidu said on Wednesday that it will use Wenxin to improve the company's artificial intelligence cloud, autonomous car system and voice assistant.

Baidu CEO Li Yanhong said at the call meeting with analysts that the company will open a large language model to the public as a business service.He said that some agencies have decided to introduce Wenxin into their products and services.

Following the WeChat parent company Tencent, e -commerce company Jingdong Group, and voice recognition technology providers, these companies have not released specific plans.NetEase in the game company said it is exploring how to incorporate the basic technologies behind ChatGPT into its educational products.Wang Huiwen, co -founder of Meituan, a catering and takeaway company, said that he plans to invest $ 50 million to create China's OpenAI; although he admits that he doesn't know much about this technology.

The foundation of

ChatGPT is based on large language models, and this model is trained with massive language data.From improving search results and enhancing voice assistants to automatic review content, this model is of great benefit to a series of commercial applications.

In China, Baidu and Alibaba ranked among the first batch of companies to create their own large -language models.Baidu released a large model called Wenxin in 2019, and then advanced with the development of related technologies related to Google and Openai, and used to improve the search business.Alibaba released a pre -training model called M6 in 2021 and continued to invest in the technology.Alibaba uses this technology to support its customer service chat function Ali Xiaomi.

The Inspur Group of Huawei Technology and Information Technology Group, and the Beijing Zhiyuan Artificial Intelligence Research Institute and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which are supported by the government, have produced their own large language models.

Chinese companies are now relying on these foundations to make products to be targeting ChatGPT.However, some experts believe that only a few companies can quickly do this.

One of the reasons is that the channels for Chinese companies to obtain various data are relatively limited.ChatGPT relies on one of the largest language models today, namely Openai's GPT-3.5. This model benefits a large amount of English data covering many theme areas and disciplines on the global network.Chinese data is not so rich, and it is still facing strict review and control in China.

Feng Yan, director of the Artificial Intelligence Research Center of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, said that in addition to the public available data, most Chinese companies only have text and dialogue data in specific fields, such as financial or e -commerce.Feng Yan said that Baidu's data ownership is relatively prominent because Baidu has to prepare network indexes for its own search engine.

The US export control of advanced process chips may cause another serious obstacle.A recent study found that most large language models developed in China in the past two years have been trained on A100 graphics processors produced by Nvidia. At present, this graphics processor has been included in the scope of US export control.Jeffrey Ding, a co -author of this papers and a politicalist at George Washington University's research technical change, said that once a company uses high -end chips for inventory, its progress may slow down.

China's strict review system and regulatory ecosystem will challenge the development of this technology in other respects.The problems about the error information or weird and aggressive content of ChatGPT have emerged.Chinese scientific and technological experts said that Chinese companies are facing greater pressure, and they must ensure that their chat robots will not discuss on political sensitive topics.

China's Internet regulatory agency also issued new regulations on generating AI technology in January this year, which is the world's first such regulation.The new regulations require developers with ChatGPT and image generation tools when images, videos and texts may be misunderstood as real content, and they are synthesized or edited in obvious positions.

and Feng Yan said that the real obstacle will appear after the development of ChatGPT, that is, how to use the technology safely and effectively.She said that the key is who can develop a killer application; in this sense, Chinese companies can show their skills in innovation.