Releases of advanced Chinese AI chatbots are highly anticipated. But hasty adoption could lead to mistakes likely to be quickly identified by consumers.
What Happened: China’s tech giants are racing to introduce similar services to OpenAI’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT, which is taking the internet by storm.
E-commerce giant JD.com announced on February 10 that it will release an “industrial ChatGPT” called ChatJD that’s intended to help businesses with content generation, human-machine interaction, livestream e-commerce, and customer service in finance and retail. JD.com’s chief competitor Alibaba said last week that it’s internally testing a generative AI platform similar to ChatGPT. Neither JD.com nor Alibaba provided a launch timeline.
Baidu, which operates popular Chinese search engine Baidu.com, revealed that it has since 2019 been working on a similar chatbot called Ernie Bot, with a release scheduled for next month. Meanwhile, internet giant NetEase said it’s developing a generative AI for its education subsidiary Youdao and aims to release a demo soon.
Notably, Chinese luxury e-commerce retail platform Secoo stated on February 6 that it will “conduct in-depth research and expansion on AI Generated Content (AIGC) and ChatGPT-related technologies” to improve its customer conversion rate. Secoo’s stock on Nasdaq jumped by 124 percent that day to $3.77 per share, the highest since March, 2020.
The Jing Take: Although internet users in China cannot easily access ChatGPT, Chinese netizens, like their global peers, are deeply intrigued by it.
An analysis of Google Trends in late January found that China accounted for a high volume of searches for ChatGPT, and the hashtag “when will China’s own ChatGPT emerge” has gained 220 million views on Weibo. It’s no surprise that China’s tech giants are riding the ChatGPT wave. Chinese AI-related stocks have surged since the start of 2023 as Chinese investors are betting that domestic options will emerge soon, and it’s in the interests of Chinese tech companies to maintain this momentum. Continue to read the full article here
