Beijing has stepped up the pace of its efforts to build its own artificial intelligence chatbots as Chinese news media express fears the United States will use ChatGPT to brainwash Chinese people.
Since the Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI unveiled ChatGPT last November, many Chinese companies have announced their plans to launch their chatbots in 2023.
Chinese search giant Baidu targets the completion of internal testing of its AI chatbot called Ernie Bot by the end of March. Other key players include Alibaba, Tencent and JD.com.
China’s Ministry of Science and Technology also says it will support state-owned and private firms’ development of their AI technologies.
“ChatGPT received a lot of attention as it has integrated big data, computing power and AI technologies and also improved in calculation methods,” Wang Zhigang, Minister of Science and Technology, said on the sidelines of the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress on Sunday.
Wang said the ministry has made a lot of preparations to boost China’s AI technology, which can be used in many other areas including academic research.
“AI chatbots are built on the same principles but they perform differently,” Wang said, noting that everyone can play football but it’s not easy to play as well as Argentine professional footballer Lionel Messi.
Wang’s calls came after state media said last month that ChatGPT might create national security risks to China.
China Daily said in a Weibo post on February 20 that the US government may use ChatGPT to spread disinformation in China and manipulate global narratives for its own geopolitical interests. It said that, when the ChatGPt is asked questions about Xinjiang issues, the bot toes the line of Washington.
Currently, people on the mainland can only access ChatGPT through virtual personal networks (VPNs) or third-party apps.
Nikkei reported on February 22 that China’s regulators had told major technology firms, including Tencent Holdings and Ant Group, not to offer access to ChatGPT services on their platforms. It said technology companies need to report to regulators before they launch their own chatbots.
Due to the tightening rules, Tencent has recently stopped providing third-party services for ChatGPT, according to the report.
Chinese commentators say China should create its own chatbots as ChatGPT, which gives analysis based on English materials, is not suitable for the country.
A Henan-based columnist in an article published on February 27 says that China has banned many influencers, or so-called “Big V” (verified social media users), for inappropriate speech but actually ChatGPT’s influence on the country has surpassed all these opinion leaders.
“Much evidence shows that ChatGPT is a political tool for the US to influence China,” says the writer. “It is like opium, a chronic poison. Although it does not hard-sell American hegemony, it implants such a concept into its system and tries to stir up disputes in China.”
He says ChatGPT tends to give negative comments about China, for example by concluding that China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter without citing other reports that say the US is the biggest emitter.
A Beijing-based writer says ChatGPT often makes mistakes when answering questions in Chinese. For example, he says the chatbot sometimes mixes up Chinese poems and international musicians and it provides different answers at different times.
He says that, among other players, Baidu’s Ernie Bot has the biggest potential to win in the Chinese markets.
Liu Qingfeng, chairman of iFlytek, an intelligent speech and AI firm, says that most existing Chinese chatbots have not yet passed the required tests, or undergone large-scale pre-training, meaning that they are lagging behind ChatGPT by a great distance.
“If our country doesn’t catch up now, we will be in a passive situation in the global competition of information, digital economy, human-computer interaction and scientific research,” Liu says.
Jiao Licheng, director of the Faculty of Computer Science and Technology of Xidian University, says AI technology is a combination of different subjects including computing, language, sociology, biology and political economy – but China does not have enough talent with knowledge crossover.
Zhang Yunquan, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, says the shortage of high-end chips in China seems to be a bigger problem.
Zhang saiysChinese chips have not yet reached the standard of Nvidia Corp’s A100 or H100 chips. He said China must increase its investments in making AI chips.
Last September, the US government told Nvidia to stop exporting its A100 and H100 chips to China and Russia. The US also restricted sales of AMD’s MI250 Accelerator AI chip to China.
Nvidia reportedly tailor-made A800, which is 30% slower than A100, for China but the product remains undersupplied.
Microsoft said last November it would build its AI cloud server with tens of thousands of A100 and H100 chips.
Read: China leads US in tech that matters most: report
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