Alibaba Group Holding announced it is testing a ChatGPT-like service that takes advantage of its years of research in large language models.
A spokesperson for Alibaba, the company that owns the South China Morning Post, confirmed on Thursday that the research centre Damo Academy is testing its services internally but did not give a specific launch date. Other significant Chinese tech companies, besides Alibaba, have announced plans to create or use services akin to ChatGPT.
In a rush to develop China’s response to San Francisco-based OpenAI’s chatbot, which has sparked a frenzy among investors and the general public, Alibaba Group Holding announced it is testing a ChatGPT-like service that takes advantage of its years of research in large language models.
The company is joining with other Chinese Tech companies such as web search giant Baidu in this endeavor. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is a key player in the nation’s artificial intelligence (AI) research.
Pretraining for Language Understanding and Generation, a model for natural language processing introduced by Damo in April 2021, has 27 billion so-called parameters, a metric for the complexity and size of an AI model. In the same year, the institute created M6, the first 10-trillion-parameter pre-training model in the world.
ChatGPT’s underlying language processing model, OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), was launched in 2020 with 175 billion parameters. One of the top technological trends to watch for in 2023, according to Damo’s annual report released last month, is “generative AI,” which generates new output based on a set of texts, images, or audio files it has been trained on.
According to a source familiar with the situation, Baidu will integrate Ernie Bot into its search engine, and CEO Robin Li Yanhong has set a major objective for the company to “lead a generational disruption in the search experience” in the first quarter.
According to a company representative, Tencent Holdings has outlined its strategy for related technologies, and organised progress is being made in research on particular topics.
One of the top three online retailer platform operators in China, JD.com, “is accelerating AI applications powered by ChatGPT-related technological achievements,” according to a statement released by the company on Thursday.
According to a report in the Shanghai Securities Journal, the world’s largest video game developer, NetEase, is presently developing a product for its online education business that “originates from the technology used by ChatGPT.”
ChatGPT, released to the general public two months ago, has been widely discussed for its ability to hold humanlike conversations on topics ranging from poetry to history, write lyrics and university-level essays, and dispense life advice. The ChatGPT Index, compiled by Shanghai-based data service provider Wind, has jumped over 16% in the past five trading days.
Hanwang Technology, listed in Shenzhen, and Cloud Walk Technology, listed in Shanghai, have both received inquiries from their respective stock exchanges after their share prices increased by twofold in a matter of three weeks as a result of reports that they are developing ChatGPT-like technology.
Through Tencent’s WeChat app, a number of domestic startups are offering access to ChatGPT or comparable services, but only to users who know where to look.
Although there had been several mini-programmes named after the OpenAI bot that was offering trial use, a search for “ChatGPT” mini-programmes on WeChat turned up nothing on Thursday.
Shanghai-based Entropy Cloud Network Technology changed the name of its service on Wednesday from “ChatGPT Online” to “AI Conversation” after launching a chatbot on WeChat that it claimed was built using similar technologies to those of ChatGPT.
Users can ask ChatGPT five questions per day through the free service offered by Chat Dada, a public account on WeChat, without having to go around China’s Great Firewall internet censorship system.
After some users complained that the original name had led them to believe the account was connected to ChatGPT, it recently changed its name to “GPT Dada.” An inquiry about Tencent’s policy regarding the provision of ChatGPT-related services on WeChat wof ChatGPTmmediately answered.