Following the release last month to mixed reviews, Baidu unveiled Ernie, its chatbot which could create vivid art but had trouble with simple logic and couldn’t write code like GPT-4 and the launch at the beginning of April of SenseTime’s SenseChat bot by CEO, Xu Li, which was able to write an email and write a story about a cat catching a fish, Alibaba in mid-April 2023 launched a ChatGPT rival, Tongyi Qianwen, which roughly translates to “truth from a thousand questions”, and following many Chinese companies announcing an intention to deploy generative AI models, the Chinese Government has announced controls on their deployment.
In an effort to regulate how its tech sector deploys generative AI models, China’s influential Internet regulator published draft regulations that are likely to restrict the rollout of the Alibaba, SenseTime and Baidu’s ChatGPT-like bots, citing the potential for “social mobilization”. The Chinese user tests have reported that both Ernie and Tongyi fabricate information about fictitious individuals although this would be banned under the new CAC regulations.
The Chinese Administrator of Cyberspace (“CAC”) rules would mean that vendors will need to register their products in a database and submit them for security evaluations prior to their release to the general public as well as verifying all users’ identities using their names and national ID numbers, so that usage can be monitored, although given that the US equivalents have all admitted that they do not understand how the generative AI systems actually work, the eyes will be on China to see how the security calculations are carried out.
The CAC regulations state that “content generated by generative artificial intelligence must embody core social values and must not contain any content that subverts state power or advocates the overthrow of the socialist system, incites nationalism or undermines national unity.”
Tongyi Qianwen is intended to be incorporated within the DingTalk office collaboration tool and the Tmall Genie smart speakers before eventually being included in all of the company’s products.
Alibaba’s CEO Zhang said, “We are at a technological watershed moment driven by generative AI and cloud computing.”
Alibaba’s cloud division, which Zhang personally took over in December amid slowing growth, is where its efforts are hidden and where a detailed organizational restructuring is ongoing to divide Alibaba into six entities, under one common holding company to allow each division to be more agile.
User reports say that the chatbot could write poems in Chinese and French and solve simple mathematical problems, but had trouble with straightforward logic, providing a recipe that included slicing the concrete into small pieces in response to a user’s query about how to stir-fry reinforced concrete to make a tasty dish. (Strangely Baidu’s Ernie also noted that concrete was “a very special ingredient). The same query was asked of ChatGPT, which responded that it did not comprehend the request and that concrete was not edible.
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