If there is one thing Chinese tech companies are good at, it’s copying what works from American companies who created something revolutionary. Why be original when you can steal IP seems to be their philosophy, and the big Chinese tech companies are busy coming up with their version of ChatGPT-style products these days.
But since this is China, the companies doing this, like Alibaba and NetEase, have to be very careful because the Communist government is always watching, and if there is information resembling the truth, or at the very least not what the leaders would want people to have access to there will undoubtedly be “suggestions’ from above.
To avoid that, the companies working on it say their project is technology in application-specific scenarios, according to a story in CNBC. In other words, their version won’t be able to write the term papers for lazy college students like it can here.
Here’s what Paul Triolo of Albright Stonebridge told CNBC.
“Given all the regulatory focus on both tech platforms and AI algorithms over the past year by a range of government bodies, the big tech platforms are not eager to draw attention to themselves by putting out a chatbot/generative AI tool that gets them in hot water.”
In China, the government controls what is available on the internet. If there is a website they don’t like, it doesn’t exist for Chinese consumers. Here’s the rub with ChatGPT — it is not blocked by the Chinese government yet, but OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, does not allow users in China to sign up.
Here’s another quote from Triolo.
“ChatGPT poses some unique challenges for Beijing. The app, trained on western uncensored data, represents a more powerful type of search engine than Google or others that are also uncensored outside of China.”
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