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Several prominent Chinese entrepreneurs over the weekend expressed their confidence that Chinese companies will eventually catch up with ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot developed by US-based OpenAI, while talking about the vast potential for the AI chatbot sector in the future. 

ChatGPT and the emerging AI chatbot sector are making a splash worldwide and stirred up excitement and discussion in China during the annual Yabuli China Entrepreneurs Forum held in Yabuli, Northeast China's Heilongjiang Province over the weekend.

Liu Yonghao, chairman of New Hope Group, said at the forum on Saturday that he is following the trend of ChatGPT and considering the possibility of adapting smart technology to agriculture, news website thepaper.cn reported.

"When news about ChatGPT was first reported in China, I paid close attention to it and arranged employees to conduct research and discussion," Liu said.

In Liu's opinion, although the products launched by OpenAI are leading in the world at present, Chinese enterprises will definitely "catch up" through constant iteration.

 "Over time, I believe that China's intelligent development will reach a higher level," Liu said.

Robin Li Yanhong, founder, chairman and CEO of Chinese tech company Baidu, responded to the widespread attention given to his firm's ChatGPT-style chatbot known as ERNIE Bot during the forum on Friday.

Baidu unveiled ERNIE Bot on Thursday. Its demo, which used pre-recorded videos, triggered discussion about the robustness of the ERNIE Bot.

Li said that the feedback was pretty much what he had expected. "If you look at ChatGPT when it was first launched, the feedback was worse than ERNIE Bot," Li noted, adding that he is paying attention to the feedback after the internal test of the ERNIE Bot.

Li said that ERNIE Bot is a typical product that needs feedback to improve, so he was keen to release the product as early as possible.

At a company event in Shenzhen on Friday, Ren Zhengfei, founder of Chinese tech giant Huawei, said that in the future, there will be a lot of players engaged in building large AI-centric models, and Microsoft will not be the only one, thepaper.cn reported.

Ren said 98 percent of the contribution of AI software platform companies is for the promotion of the industrial and agricultural sectors. The popularization of AI services requires strong 5G connection. 

"What is the opportunity of ChatGPT for us? It will enlarge the amount of computing and the pipeline flow so that there is demand for our product," Ren said.

China is becoming a pioneer in the field of AI, making strides in filing AI patents amid the nation's innovation drive.

Driven by the double dividends of technology and policy, the average annual compound growth rate of deep-learning patent applications in China reached 53 percent from 2016 to 2021, and their role in promoting AI is prominent, according to the China Artificial Intelligence Patent Technology Analysis Report (2022) released in December.


Global Times