Amid ChatGPT frenzy, a hundred followers bloom in China

News Summary

  • A developer made a tool that can translate chat history into digestible bullet points, which comes in handy when one wakes up finding 100 unread group messages on WeChat.We wrote previously that censorship is perhaps one of the biggest challenges for the future of natural-language systems in China.
  • Will Ernie Bot and its local rivals be adroit enough to spot the ever-changing puns and emoticons used for skirting censorship?State control shapes not only the rules of AI applications but also how much resources go towards certain types of AI research.
  • At the time of writing, it has hidden enterprise accounts (think Facebook Pages) with misleading names that contain “ChatGPT” from its search results, presumably to protect users from these dubious copycats.I tested one account, blatantly named “ChatGPT”, out of curiosity.
  • But Baidu reportedly gleans data from both inside and outside the Great Firewall, China’s elaborate censorship mechanism.That makes perfect sense because there is a much greater amount of English source data such as academic research.
  • But load time is slow, and users can’t sign up with Chinese phone numbers, which adds an extra barrier to using it.China wants its own intelligent natural-language systems for reasons ranging from language to politics, as we wrote before.
  • But one knows froth is forming when investors start rallying around smaller AI players that are far from being able to develop powerful language models.
Technological breakthroughs in the U.S. never fail to inspire challengers, followers and opportunists in China. Its ChatGPTs turn to capture the imagination of the worlds largest internet populati [+5289 chars]