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Chinese ChatGPT alternatives just got approved for the general public
By Zeyi Yang | MIT Technology Review | August 30, 2023
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On Wednesday, Baidu, one of China’s leading artificial-intelligence companies, announced it would open up access to its ChatGPT-like large language model, Ernie Bot, to the general public.
It’s been a long time coming. Launched in mid-March, Ernie Bot was the first Chinese ChatGPT rival. Since then, many Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, have followed suit and released their own models. Yet all of them forced users to sit on waitlists or go through approval systems, making the products mostly inaccessible for ordinary users—a possible result, people suspected, of limits put in place by the Chinese state.
When Ernie Bot was released on March 16, the response was a mix of excitement and disappointment. Many people deemed its performance mediocre relative to the previously released ChatGPT. But most people simply weren’t able to see it for themselves. The launch event didn’t feature a live demonstration, and later, to actually try out the bot, Chinese users need to have a Baidu account and apply for a use license that could take as long as three months to come through. Because of this, some people who got access early were selling secondhand Baidu accounts on e-commerce sites, charging anywhere from a few bucks to over $100.
More than a dozen Chinese generative AI chatbots were released after Ernie Bot. They are all pretty similar to their Western counterparts in that they are capable of conversing in text—answering questions, solving math problems (somewhat), writing programming code, and composing poems. Some of them also allow input and output in other forms, like audio, images, data visualization, or radio signals.
Like Ernie Bot, these services came with restrictions for user access, making it difficult for the general public in China to experience them. Some were allowed only for business uses. One of the main reasons Chinese tech companies limited access to the general public was concern that the models could be used to generate politically sensitive information.
Even with the new access, it’s unclear how many people will use the products. The initial lack of access to Chinese chatbot alternatives decreased public interest in them. While ChatGPT has not been officially released in China, many Chinese people are able to access the OpenAI chatbot by using VPN software.
3 key takeaways from the article
- On Wednesday, Baidu, one of China’s leading artificial-intelligence companies, announced it would open up access to its ChatGPT-like large language model, Ernie Bot, to the general public.
- Since March all the tech companies which launched their AI forced users to sit on waitlists or go through approval systems, making the products mostly inaccessible for ordinary users—a possible result, people suspected, of limits put in place by the Chinese state. One of the main reasons Chinese tech companies limited access to the general public was concern that the models could be used to generate politically sensitive information.
- Even with the new access, it’s unclear how many people will use the products. The initial lack of access to Chinese chatbot alternatives decreased public interest in them. While ChatGPT has not been officially released in China, many Chinese people are able to access the OpenAI chatbot by using VPN software.
(Copyright)
Topics: Technology, Artificial Intelligence, China
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