Nearly six years ago, a Google computer program toppled the best player in China — and the world — at Go, an ancient Chinese board game. The defeat catalyzed China’s revolution in artificial intelligence. Beijing developed a monumental artificial intelligence plan and investors poured record sums into new projects.
Now, a similar moment has arrived: the rise of ChatGPT has started another AI arms race, this time in the realm of machine-generated content. On Thursday, search giant Baidu unveiled ChatGPT’s first major Chinese rival in Beijing. But the debut of the bot, named Ernie, was a flop.
Midway through a demo that had been marketed as live, in which Ernie summarized a science fiction novel and discussed a Chinese idiom, Robin Li, Baidu’s chief executive, said the presentation had been prerecorded “to save time.”
Baidu’s shares fell 10 percent in Hong Kong, a striking contrast to this year’s rally that was fueled by the company’s announcement that it has a rival to ChatGPT in the works since 2019.
The botched launch comes as companies like Baidu and Google scramble to catch up with ChatGPT, whose maker released a new version this week. It was also a sign that China still has work to do to catch up with the United States in artificial intelligence, a race that has intensified in recent years as relations between the two countries have soured. As Washington has moved to contain competition from China, it has insulated Beijing from high-end computer chips, a key ingredient in technologies like ChatGPT and Ernie.
Due to the enormous computing requirements, only a handful of companies, most based in the US or China, have the ability to build bots that are based on what are known as long language models. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.
Baidu’s bot, whose name comes from Enhanced Representation Through Knowledge Integration, would be open to some users starting Thursday.
Ernie, Mr. Li insisted, was not a “tool for Sino-US technological competition”. But he also acknowledged that the success of ChatGPT had accelerated the timetable for Baidu’s launch.
But even before Ernie’s disappointing debut, many Chinese i was wondering whydespite billions of dollars invested by his government and venture capitalists, the nation had not recovered from its humiliation in 2017, when Google’s AlphaGo program beat Jie Ke, the champion of Go.
“China is incredibly good at scaling an existing invention, but it’s not very good at making progress,” said Huang Yasheng, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of a paper. upcoming book on chinese innovation. The country, he argued, lacks the diversity of thought and the free expression of ideas that help foster innovative thinking.
Chinese authorities last month suspended ChatYuan, one of China’s first chatbots, for providing, among other things, responses that challenged the official position of the Communist Party on Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Xu Chenggang, a senior fellow at Stanford’s Center for China Economics and Institutions, had a harsher assessment of Beijing’s efforts to build a better bot.
China’s chatbots “can’t get anywhere near the level of ChatGPT,” Xu said, because China’s strict censorship rules could undermine data quality and hinder chatbot development.
“If there are restrictions everywhere on the configuration of your algorithms, of course your ability will be restricted,” he said.
Chinese officials have also worked to temper expectations. Wang Zhigang, China’s science and technology minister, used a soccer analogy this month to convey the work that still needs to be done to compete with ChatGPT.
“Playing football involves dribbling and shooting, but it’s not easy to be as good as Messi,” he said, referring to superstar Lionel Messi.
“Our country has also made a lot of arrangements and has carried out research in this field for many years and has achieved some results,” he added. “However, it may still take some time to achieve the same level of performance as OpenAI.”
