BEIJING - Chatbot fever has caught on in China following the surging worldwide popularity of ChatGPT, with Chinese firms promising to launch rival solutions or providing updates on their existing artificial intelligence (AI) projects.
People in the world’s second-largest economy have also found ways to sign up for ChatGPT accounts, though the AI service, which provides the most life-like human responses to date, is not yet available in China.
Currently, those in China are allowed to access ChatGPT’s website, but are not allowed to sign up for accounts using their China mobile phone numbers.
Investors have bought into the AI chatbot frenzy as well, with the stock prices of AI companies such as Beijing Deep Glint Technology, CloudWalk Technology, and Hanwang Technology soaring as much as 60 per cent earlier in February.
The chatbot fever has hit such a frenzy that some of the firms have had to release statements confirming that they do not have the ability to roll out products similar to ChatGPT or to clarify that they are not collaborating with ChatGPT’s parent company OpenAI, which is backed by US tech giant Microsoft.
Chinese bourses have questioned at least three firms for unusual share hikes since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, with the Shanghai Stock Exchange warning investors on Feb 7 to “avoid capital risks, hype and to make rational decisions and prudent investments”.
The hype hit a point that prompted Securities Times, a state-owned financial newspaper, to say in a front-page editorial on Feb 8 that “some companies are riding on the ChatGPT fervour, just like previous waves such as 5G and augmented and virtual reality technologies”, which have ebbed with time.
“Investors have been lured into such pump-and-dump schemes, eventually being reduced to tears, so they should not follow,” the editorial added.
ChatGPT clones have also popped up on WeChat, a ubiquitous social messaging app in China, and that has led to the local media warning the Chinese not to be duped.
These copycats, which have been scrubbed off WeChat, used parts of ChatGPT’s code to create their own “trial services” and offer subscribers unlimited access for a year if they paid up to 999 yuan (S$195).
A developer who uses natural language processing – a type of AI that enables computers to understand text and spoken words – for work said he signed up for a ChatGPT account using a virtual private network (VPN) service and a US mobile number to “check out China’s competition”.
“I was very impressed with ChatGPT. It felt as if a human had typed those answers but, at the same time, it will tell you its limitations because it is just a bot. There’s nothing in China quite like it yet,” he said, declining to be named because using VPN in China without a valid work reason is illegal.
So far, Baidu, which runs China’s most popular search engine, has said it will launch Ernie Bot in March by embedding the service into its website to provide users with conversation-style searches – an announcement that has caused its share price to hike 15 per cent, the most since March 2022.
Other tech giants like Tencent, Alibaba, JD.com, and NetEase have made similar announcements as well.
But Mr Bo Zhengyuan, a partner at the Plenum consultancy in Shanghai, warned investors and users not to expect too much from chatbots built in China.
“The fundamental logic to build a chatbot that can rival ChatGPT is this: If you do not have an open Web search system, anything you develop will not be user-friendly,” he said, referring to China’s Great Firewall that keeps the country in a seemingly separate Internet sphere from the rest of the world. It bars websites like Google, Twitter and Instagram.
Professor Lawrence Loh, director of the Centre for Governance and Sustainability at NUS Business School in Singapore, said “Chinese firms are unlikely to exactly emulate ChatGPT”. “Chinese firms have to be sensitive to the social needs of the users and align with the broader developmental aspirations of the country, such as common prosperity.”
Mr Bo said: “But China will still feel the need to develop its own ChatGPT to showcase its own digital sovereignty.”