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AI chatbots in China: information cocoons or productivity tools?

Zijing Fu

posted on February 17, 2023 7:51 pmEditor : Wang Boyuan

The launch of ChatGPT dropped a bomb in the once-neglected AI field and sparked a wildfire—many have been debating the tool’s legality, ethics, potential, and ramifications for employment, education, and beyond. Meanwhile, technology corporations have continuously fed the blaze. On February 6th, Google released Bard. On February 7, Microsoft unveiled ChatGPT-enhanced Bing.

Here, in the Chinese market, the wildfire manifested as waves of aftershocks, each of which painted a clearer picture.

On December 23, less than a month after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, the beta version of YuanYu AI was released. YuanYu AI, commonly known as ChatYuan, is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by the Chinese startup Yuanyu, which also produced “PromptCLUE”, a large-scale multi-tasking prompt pre-trained Chinese open source model.

According to his post on WeChat on December 23, the developer, Xu Liang, described YuanYu AI as “a ChatGPT-like service developed by Chinese people that you can use without a VPN."

YuanYu AI, which was formally accessible through the WeChat mini program and its website, has been taken offline for unexplained reasons and is expected to return on February 13 at 12:00. (The program remains unavailable at the time of writing.) Though nothing concrete points to the unexpected shutdown of YuanYu AI, netizens have speculated that it was due to YuanYu’s imprudent remarks and strict censorship in China.

Although reasonable speculations include “the program crashed due to high volume” or the “beta-testing phase simply ended”, the “nip politically incorrect AIs in the bud” theory does raise an underlying question - Does China have the environment for ChatGPT-style AI chatbots to flourish?

Theoretically, the capacities of AI chatbots are contingent on the text data fed into the chatbots. When restrictions such as censorship are imposed on the input or output of chatbots, their computational and analytical abilities are similarly restrained. The AI chatbots would be encased in an informational cocoon, which would be propagated and promoted over the whole user base when the chatbots were deployed.

Then how is ChatGPT spreading throughout China? Let us take a look at what Chinese tech giants are doing.

Baidu introduced the ERNIE bot on February 7, naming it after its pre-training language model, which stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration. Although Baidu has not disclosed specifics about the bot, it is widely speculated that ERNIE Bot would resemble ChatGPT and serve to enhance Baidu’s search engine.

Baidu placed its bet on AI and natural language processing technology before introducing Ernie Bot. In November 2021, Baidu announced PLATO-XL, an AI chatbot without the required analytical and computing skills of a ChatGPT-style application. PLATO-XL has trained on over a billion samples collected from social media conversations in both English and Chinese and developed them based on their PaddlePaddle deep-learning platform.

Baidu has also announced a framework agreement with iQiyi, a video streaming platform under Baidu’s umbrella, to use ERNIE Bot to “enhance its user experience” in terms of “content search, promotion, novel creation and tools, among other areas.”

JD.com announced ChatJD on February 10. ChatJD has no expected launch date yet but will focus on retail and finance scenarios based on the abilities of JD Cloud, which “has over ten years of experience in the fields of retail and finance and has accumulated four layers of knowledge system, more than 40 independent subsystems, more than 3,000 categories, and more than 30 million high-quality Q&A knowledge points, covering more than 10 million kinds of self-owned products in the e-commerce knowledge map," according to the company.

Kuaishou is committed to Large Language Model (LLM) research, including model training, copy-writing generation, and conversational system development. Kuaishou’s foray into the area will focus on e-commerce scenarios, covering applications such as digital humans, smart (AI) customer service, and a smart (AI) assistant.

360 Search, a search engine with 35% market share launched by Qihoo 360, is expecting a “ChatGPT-styled product demo as soon as possible." The company has invested in AIGC technologies, including ChatGPT-like services, since 2020. However, Qihoo 360 later clarified that “as of now, all the results achieved only serve as productivity tools for internal use within the company. The company's ChatGPT-like technology can only reach a slightly higher level than GPT-2 on many metrics, and there is still a considerable gap compared to the current ChatGPT.”

QAX, or Qi Anxin, a leading cybersecurity firm in China that grossed $6.6 million in 2021 and supported the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, stated that it has achieved results in ChatGPT-like reinforcement learning and large language model technologies. The company will explore the application of ChatGPT-like service in the field of network security, such as threat detection, vulnerability mining, security operations and automation, offensive and defensive operations, anti-virus, threat intelligence analysis and operations, analysis of cybercrime, etc.

NetEase Youdao, the online learning unit of China’s gaming giant, said its team has “invested in the ChatGPT-based AIGC technology” for educational scenarios such as AI oral tutoring and Chinese essay editing. The company expects a demo version of the product as soon as possible, with the hopes of it becoming the first application of such technology in online education in China.

In addition, Netease’s upcoming mobile MMORPG game, “Justice”, or “Nishuihan” also announced the addition of ChatGPt-like features. According to a video demo released by Nishuihan, NPCs in the game are “made alive” and can make natural conversations with players, instead of pre-programmed dialogues.

iFlytek, the leading AI company in China, said it had already laid the groundwork in terms of generating large models and was expecting a new product launch on May 6, 2023. The new product will be a smart tablet-like educational device that incorporates iFlytek’s ”generative pertaining large models” abilities.

Have you spotted the pattern? Another pattern is that tech companies are going out of their way to prove they have ChatGPT-like technology and reassure investors and the public that they can remain competitive in the age of AI.

The majority of these Chinese IT behemoths are creating ChatGPT-like technologies for narrower applications that are specific to a certain sector or circumstance. Such actions circumvent the potential sensitivity and complexity of a one-size-fits-all chatbot and bring the enterprises one step closer to profitability, since their ChatGPT-like efforts will serve as additions to their existing businesses. This shows that only industrially focused and business-oriented ChatGPT-like solutions may be viable on the Chinese market.