The Global AI Race Heats Up: Chinese Tech Giants Compete to Build Their Own ChatGPT

There’s a Chinese version of many US apps: Baidu (Google). Alibaba (Amazon). Tencent (Meta). DiDi (Uber). And soon, there may be one for OpenAI too.

Keep your darkest secrets away from ChatGPT

On three separate occasions, Samsung employees leaked sensitive company information to ChatGPT — which can be read by OpenAI.

Global lawmakers are raising concerns over privacy and personal information being used — some even outright banning the tool.

• Italy banned ChatGPT, and other European countries are closely watching to see if it violates data privacy laws.
• Canada is investigating ChatGPT for allegedly collecting and using personal information without consent.

OpenAI is trained on Western data — which potentially raises issues for China which has a tight grip on its media and closely guards its data.

The race to become China’s OpenAI

US and China have been in a technological race since before any of us were born. Now they’re taking the competition to AI — where China has restricted access to US-based ChatGPT.

Instead, Chinese tech giants are rushing to launch their own AI models and chatbots.

• Huawei, Baidu and NetEase are working on their own AI chatbots and large language models.
• Alibaba is expected to release its own version of ChatGPT next week at the 2023 Alibaba Cloud Summit.

Alibaba still makes the majority of its sales from e-commerce — but it’s been increasingly focused on its cloud business. Since 2017, Alibaba has been working on generative AI models — and its recent split into six units could let it focus on more high-growth areas like AI.

But Google’s “Bard” hasn’t lived up to expectations, and Baidu’s “Ernie” demo debut last month underwhelmed industry observers. For now, OpenAI (i.e., Microsoft) is still in the lead.