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ChatGPT, OpenAI's highly-regarded chatbot, is making a splash worldwide and has been stirring up excitement within the Chinese AI community recently. Discussing its "impressive yet imperfect performance", some industry players also raised a question: How far are we from a ChatGPT designed by a Chinese company?

On January 30, roughly three months after its official launch, Chinese tech giant Baidu was reportedly to be planning the launch of an AI chatbot service similar to ChatGPT, which may be unveiled in March, with the initial version having been integrated into its search service, and it will allow users to receive conversational search results.

Baidu CEO Robin Li hailed the project as "leading the generational reform in the search experience," saying internally that relevant technology has reached a critical point and that Baidu has a great opportunity in it, according to a report from the domestic news site chinastarmarket.com.

China's explorations

"It's ambitious and exciting. But we believe it's achievable because the technology has reached a critical point. Technologies like ChatGPT service will get popular, but how to apply it to search scenarios is more difficult to explore than the technology itself. How can we make this happen, so that hundreds of millions of people benefit from it every day, and their efficiency is significantly improved? We have a great opportunity in this regard," Li said in the report.

"Baidu does have plans for (making) such a tool, and research was accelerated at the end of 2022," several people close to the matter told the Global Times, declining to disclose further details.

Baidu did not reply to an interview request from the Global Times.

So, what is ChatGPT? "I am ChatGPT, an AI language model developed by OpenAI. I can answer questions on various topics and perform various language tasks such as text generation, summarization and translation," the chatbot told the Global Times while being asked to introduce itself.

The chatbot goes beyond traditional ones that are focused on personal communication and provides a range of responses including code, essays, and scientific reports, and sometimes, proves to outperform human beings.

Baidu, a Chinese internet search leader in China, has its tech strength to do the "cash-burning", Liu Dingding, a veteran internet industry watcher, told the Global Times on Sunday.

Although in terms of semantic understanding and core presentation ability, it may not necessarily be better than the US one, after the first step of the official launch, as the number of users and data collected increase and computing power strengthens, its understanding will improve, and it will definitely become an indispensable tool in answering content creation questions, Liu said.

Apart from Baidu, industry watchers told the Global Times that other Chinese firms have also made forays into the sector and made some early explorations.

"Our team is currently exploring using chatbots to create short videos and other similar content, and enable creators to rev up production efficiency in content creation," a staffer at a domestic short-video company, told the Global Times.

The individual noted that though user experience of ChatGPT is "breath-taking" compared with its predecessors, disadvantages are also obvious - for instance, ChatGPT is prone to giving biased, incorrect answers, or outdated ones since its training data is unfiltered and only goes up to 2021.

"We are trying to avoid that for our training," the person said on condition of anonymity.

Other chatbots in China are also used in more professional tasks, such as programming, essay writing or game development.

Chinese tech giants such as Bytedance, Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, and SenseTime all have strong AI capabilities, as well as the accumulation of relevant data needed to develop a model, Liu said. 

However, regarding to basic AI algorithm structures and the models, Chinese enterprises lag behind by about two years, according to some industry insiders.

AI algorithm is key

ChatGPT's question-and-answer logic and performance as an AI are very good, which proves that AI has become a useful tool. The difference from the previous technology is that ChatGPT is a large model, which has a stronger understanding of contextual semantics than other AI algorithms, and the data accumulation speed is faster than its competitors, with growth and usability, Pan Helin, joint director of the Research Center for Digital Economics and Financial Innovation affiliated with Zhejiang University's International Business School, told the Global Times on Sunday.

But so far, "we have not seen a relatively strong AI algorithm model in China at this stage", Pan said. It may be technically capable, but by combining the three levels of algorithm, computing power, and data, there are currently no domestic companies that can launch ChatGPT-equivalent algorithms, Pan said.

A report released by UBS on Wednesday showed that ChatGPT is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, two months after its launch, becoming the fastest-growing consumer app.

This is an unprecedented rate of expansion - TikTok took about 9 months to reach 100 million users after its launch, while Meta's Instagram took about 2.5 years. 

"I had very mixed feelings after I tried ChatGPT - I am excited to see that artificial intelligence can develop to this point, but also concerned whether Chinese companies can rapidly catch up, though we can anticipate that," Liu said.

In essence, there exists a competition of AI capabilities between China and the US - to compete with such a strong competitor, China has to go ahead and overcome all challenges it faces, from management ideas, computing power, algorithms, and data circulation, to capital investment needed to achieve the set goal, Pan said.