Not only in Silicon Valley, Chinese technology companies are also eager to see the popularity of ChatGPT chatbots. Companies such as Alibaba, Baidu, and JD.com are busy developing technology similar to ChatGPT.
Alibaba, an e-commerce giant from China founded by Jack Ma, is reportedly testing a service similar to ChatGPT that utilizes the large language model (LLM). The service is being piloted by Damo Academy, a research institute owned by Alibaba, but the launch date is not yet known.
In April 2021, Damo introduced Pretraining for Language Understanding and Generation, an artificial intelligence (AI) model that has 27 billion parameters, as quoted from the South China Morning Post, Friday (10/2/2023).
In the same year, Damo developed an AI model called A1 which is claimed to be the world's first pre-training model with 10 trillion parameters. By comparison, GPT-3 -- the language processing model that powers ChatGPT -- has 175 billion parameters.
Apart from Alibaba, a number of other Chinese tech giants have also revealed plans to develop or integrate services similar to ChatGPT.
Baidu, the platform known as China's Google, said it would use a ChatGPT-like service called Ernie Bot for its search engine. Ernie Bot trials are expected to be completed in March 2023.
Tencent Holdings has also unveiled its strategy in related areas, and research on specific subjects is developing regularly. JD.com, one of China's largest e-commerce platforms, is also accelerating the adoption of AI-powered technologies related to ChatGPT.
Gaming giant NetEase is also developing generative AI through Youdao, one of its subsidiaries in the education sector. The product will rely on LLM and is aimed at NetEase's online education business.
Meanwhile, a number of local Chinese startups are also offering access to ChatGPT or similar services via WeChat. ChatGPT itself is not officially available in China, so many offer ChatGPT access without the need to penetrate China's 'Great Firewall',