China competing with ChatGPT
Baidu and Alibaba tout innovation, but are disadvantaged by lack of suitable data and computing power

China's tech giants, including Baidu, Alibaba and NetEase, are emulating recent artificial intelligence developments in the West, touting projects that are expected to generate the same hype as the release of ChatGPT. After months of announcing cost cuts and layoffs, the major groups are now optimistically touting investment plans to compete with OpenAI's chatbot, while trademark trolls claim words related to "ChatGPT."
Zhou Hongyi, head of Internet security firm Qihoo 360, characterized ChatGPT, a program that provides realistic text responses to questions from humans, as the beginning of the AI revolution. "It has weaknesses, but it also has unlimited potential," he said in a talk show discussion last week.
The race to match ChatGPT comes as Chinese tech groups have been rocked by regulatory attacks for most of the past two years and struggled to grow, due to the Covid-19-induced downturn.
Baidu is moving forward with concrete steps, planning to integrate a chatbot called Ernie into its search engine in the coming months, similar to Microsoft and OpenAI's Bing Chat. The AI model underlying the bot has been under development since 2019, and its latest generation has been trained on 260 billion parameters - comparable to GPT3, the technology underlying ChatGPT, in terms of size, but trained on a much smaller data set.
Baidu plans to announce new details this week about how the chatbot will be integrated into its products, including search, electric vehicles and smart assistants, according to a person close to the company.
"Baidu has invested talent and money in this space, so they are most likely to build one of China's leading GPT platforms," said Boris Van, an analyst at Bernstein who follows China's AI efforts. "They have a lot to stake on the launch."
The announcement of the possible rollout of the Ernie bot starting in March sent Baidu's shares up more than 15 percent, while Alibaba and NetEase were boosted by developments in their generative AI research. Shares of smaller AI groups such as Hanwang Technology and CloudWalk Technology have roughly doubled this year. State media warned this month that the speculative frenzy was cooling.
Since December, more than a dozen companies have hastily claimed "ChatGPT" or other words containing "GPT" as trademarks to use in everything from scientific instruments to clothing and advertising sales, according to data provider Tianyancha.
The Beijing municipal government said this month it will support companies developing their own models to match ChatGPT, while Shanghai's leading university, Fudan, brought together more than a dozen AI company executives and academics to analyze ChatGPT's development, security risks and potential use cases.
Analysts and experts, however, say the fanfare and surge in stock prices with each new announcement do not reflect how difficult it will be for Chinese groups to quickly replicate the software built by OpenAI and Google.
"Everyone wants to create ChatGPT now, but it's very difficult, especially for Chinese companies that can't get the latest Nvidia chips and have limited data sets for training AI models," said Huan Li, creator of WeChaty, one of China's most popular chatbot programs.
