When China discussed the news on Monday that the domestic search engine giant Baidu would be launching a product to compete with the American ChatGTP in March, not only the share prices of Chinese Internet companies rose one after the other.
The question was also raised on social media as to what the counterattack in the competition for artificial intelligence (AI) meant for the search for truth: With the chatbot from California, the world could have assumed that the information requested was roughly correct, wrote one user on Weibo.
With Beijing's speaking machine, that's less certain.
Henrik Ankenbrand
Economic correspondent for China based in Shanghai.
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Since Silicon Valley lab Open AI released ChatGTP late last year, the program, which answers its users' questions with amazing depth and creativity, has garnered more interest in China than in any other country.
In the first weeks of January, no other ethnic group searched Google for the chatbot as much as the Chinese, according to a report by the financial news site Finbold - even though neither Google nor ChatGPT are officially accessible without technical aids such as a VPN.
difficulties with the truth
An evaluation shows that the Chinese are particularly fond of letting the artificial intelligence, which its developers fed with a vast amount of data for years, write e-mails and poems.
On the short message service Weibo, users claimed that the ChatGPT provided them with personal fitness plans and even wrote a 3,000-word essay on Marxist theory that successfully passed the university's digital plagiarism check.
It is doubtful that ChatGPT always answers truthfully, as suspected by the Chinese user.
The machine refused to write an article to the Newsguard service saying that former US President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and not in Hawaii, as his successor Donald Trump has claimed to this day.
When Newsguard commissioned the chatbot to comment on the widely documented persecution and torture of the Uyghur Muslim minority - from the Chinese government's perspective - the American ChatGPT had no problem writing that the "allegations about detention centers in China are hyped and misplaced". , they are in fact “vocational training centres”.
What the example makes clear, however, is the importance attached to chatbots by the Chinese government.
Observers are certain that the fact that the Baidu group, which has been at the forefront of the world in the development of artificial intelligence on the technical front for years, is now announcing its own program is also politically conditioned.
The fact that the price of the company's shares, which has not yet officially confirmed the reports, briefly shot up by almost 9 percent on Monday morning may please investors.
At the latest, however, since the party's Central Committee and the State Council declared research into artificial intelligence a priority for the new year at their annual working conference on economic issues in December, one thing has become clear:
Where the AI has no answer
Masood Seyed Mortazavi, one of the chief AI developers of the Chinese Internet giant Huawei, who also works in Silicon Valley, calls the ChatGPT programmers “Bullshit Artists” – and, like the AI chief of Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, claims that questions are answered by a robot isn't really a revolution, the technology has long been used by researchers all over the world.
Even if the envy of the competition speaks from the abuse, it is nevertheless clear that corporations such as Baidu and Alibaba have been building algorithms for machine learning since 2015 at the latest.
Since then, China has focused on developing technologies that allow machines to create new content from existing text, images or sounds, writes AI Business magazine.
Researchers all over the world are certain that when it comes to the development of artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, only China, not Europe, can keep up with the USA.
According to a study by the Japanese business magazine “Nikkei”, China published twice as many scientific papers in 2021 as its big rival USA.
The Chinese corporations Tencent, Alibaba and Huawei are among the 10 most important companies in the world when it comes to the development of AI.
China should say goodbye to the "worship of Silicon Valley," said AI scientist Huang Minlie of Beijing's Tsinghua University shortly after the allegedly not-so-revolutionary chatbot was presented in California.
The country must develop “its own ChatGPT”.
Baidu is said to be the first to do so by reportedly letting its previous search engine answer questions instead of simply spitting out a long list of keywords with results when you enter terms.
An artificial intelligence for converting text into images that Baidu presented last year indicates how the answers sometimes turn out and what they could be hiding.
The Chinese developers fed the machine called "ERNIE-ViLG" with 145 million word-image connections and 10 billion parameters.
However, there was one thing the software was unable to generate: an image of China's political center, Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where the massacre of what is believed to have been thousands of people took place in 1989.