As OpenAI’s ChatGPT product skyrocketed in popularity late last year, a flurry of Chinese tech firms have responded with rival products for the domestic market, where the US-made generative AI chatbot is unavailable. This article provides an overview of some of the key competitors in this emerging technology space.
Baidu, the Beijing-based search engine, became one of the first Chinese players to jump in, unveiling Ernie Bot in February, only to be followed by a press event the after month. Though reactions were a bit uneven at first, it has since improved, with the Ernie Bot embedded within Baidu’s internal management platform, and over 90,000 enterprises applying to access the service. Baidu has devoted extensive efforts to natural language processing and pre-trained language models, the same technologies behind ChatGPT’s success.
Alibaba is yet another key player, rolling out its Tongyi Qianwen chatbot, which works together with the company’s collaboration platform, Dingtalk. On the occasion of the integrated service launching, users were given a glimpse of Tongyi Qianwen’s content generation capacity, which allows Dingtalk to put together summaries of previous conversations when new additions join. Moreover, it’s research division, DAMO Academy, has been dedicating its resources towards cutting-edge developments, particularly in the generative AI area.
iFlyTek, the voice recorder and transcription software company, is standing close to catch up with ChatGPT, declaring an up and coming 1+N Cognitive Language Model, with “1” representing the anchor model which is provided with background training, and ” N” being the subset dedicated to potential industries.
Three more AI unicorns are pushing to match the generative AI trend, including SenseTime which has launched SenseNova and SenseChat, Huawei with Pangu and Qihoo 360, the cybersecurity firm, with Smart Brain (public testing available).
Tencent Holdings, the Shenzhen-based corporation controlling entertainment, has been quite quiet when it comes to its ChatGPT plans. In a report, its president Martin Lau said they want to do things right and not in a hurry. Media has reported Tencent has crafted a HunyuanAide AI service based on the Hunyuan Language Model – includes WeChat, gaming, advertising and short video platforms.
At the same time, The Institute of Automation at the Chinese Academy of Sciences launched the world’s first multi-modal pre-trained language model (Zhidong Taichu) well before ChatGPT made the headlines.
The race to catch up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT has attracted many contenders in the Chinese market. The ability of these organisations to produce innovative and competitive language models and AI products will prove essential in meeting the needs of businesses in the digital economy.
