Microsoft President Brad Smith warned that U.S. firms should be prepared for Chinese tech companies becoming close rivals of ChatGPT, the most popular AI-powered chatbot, by the late 2022. Smith named OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT and its partners such as Microsoft, Google, and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) as the three major players in the AI race.
Smith suggested that due to the shorter gap between technological advancement, the concerns of AI technology replacing jobs, spreading false and misleading information, copyright infringement, and data privacy issues can be addressed by improving existing products rather than stopping innovation. He also noted AI technology could help alleviate the labor shortage in Asia, one of the biggest challenges in the region.
BAAI was founded in November 2018, and by March 2020 had released Wudao, a pre-trained deep learning model matching ChatGPT and in June 2021, Wudao 2.0 was unveiled, composed of 1.75 trillion parameters and based on the GLM 2.0 architecture. BAAI also began to develop an intelligent life sciences platform called eVolution, with the MetaWorm module mimicking a roundworm released in May 2021.
Following the success of ChatGPT, Chinese tech companies such as Baidu, Tencent, and SenseTime all released language models based on the same technology, such as Ernie Bot by Baidu, a chatbot that integrates with Baidu search and other services, and Tencent’s chatbot integrated with QQ and WeChat and Tencent Cloud. SenseTime similarly debuted a chatbot, called SenseChat, which includes capabilities like picture, sentiment, and video creation.
Brad Smith is the current president of Microsoft and has held this position since 2015. Smith has been heavily involved in civic initiatives, making him advocate for global digital security, digital regulation, national data protection frameworks, and humanitarian issues.
Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) is a private non-profit organization engaged in AI research and development, founded in 2018. BAAI has been committed to optimize the research and development in AI, and released Wudao, a deep learning model matching ChatGPT, Wudao 2.0 and the intelligent life sciences platform eVolution and MetaWorm module. With the support of investors such as CY Sciences, Baidu, Microsoft, Tencent, and Sequoia Capital China, BAAI’s researches have resulted in providing hard-ware and software solutions and stepping up China’s AI development.
