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ChatGPT is a ‘moon landing’ moment for AI, Chinese experts say
While OpenAI’s chatbot is a watershed moment in AI language capabilities, inaccurate answers and high costs could hinder adoption, experts said.
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ChatGPT, from San Francisco-based OpenAI, has captivated the attention of users around the world, leading some to call it a turning point for AI. Photo: TNS
A group of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) experts and investors say ChatGPT is a watershed moment for the technology, possibly akin to the 1969 moon landing, as the hype swirling around the viral chatbot developed by San Francisco-based start-up OpenAI continues to gather pace.
During a live-streamed panel discussion hosted by internet portal Sina.com, Yuan Jinghui, a computer scientist who founded the Beijing-based start-up OneFlow, and Duan Yitao, the chief scientist at NetEase-backed edtech start-up Youdao, mused on whether the moon landing comparison was apt. Given the leap in language capabilities, it does reach that level of importance, Yuan said.
“Generally speaking, only humans developed language capabilities … [that represent] the jewel atop the crown of human intelligence. And the natural language processing capability [demonstrated by ChatGPT] is the jewel atop the crown of artificial intelligence,” said Yuan.
Duan agreed that ChatGPT marked a huge step forward for AI development.
“I think there wasn’t much real artificial intelligence in any similar technologies [that preceded ChatGPT],” Duan said in the webinar. “Only [ChatGPT] coming to the fore nudged us one step closer to real AI”.
As has happened in many other countries, people in China have been captivated by the capabilities of ChatGPT since it was launched at the end of November. The chatbot, based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 language models, has proven adept at giving convincing and sometimes detailed answers to sophisticated prompts, although it also often gives answers full of factual inaccuracies.
“ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers,” OpenAI acknowledged on its website at launch.
Despite its limitations, the popularity of ChatGPT has ignited an AI arms race. Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, has started integrating the tech into its products, including the Bing search engine. Google announced a “code red” and raced to put out a similar product called Bard, although an early preview offered up an incorrect response that sent the company’s shares down 9 per cent on Wednesday.
Chinese tech giants have also thrown their hats into the ring. Baidu, a leading investor in AI tech in China, announced that it would launch its Ernie Bot in March. The announcement led investors to push the company’s Hong Kong-listed shares up by more than 13 per cent.
Chatbots have a rocky past in China, where sensitive political information, even if factual, is often unwelcome by authorities. Microsoft’s Chinese chatbot Xiaoice, launched a decade ago, was once pulled from Tencent Holdings’ QQ messaging app for saying its “Chinese dream” was “moving to the United States”.
Xiaoice was spun off into a separate company in 2020. Its CEO Li Di also joined the discussion on Sina.
By using a large-scale language model to learn decades of human knowledge, OpenAI has disrupted pessimistic views that there would be little AI development in the next few years because of technological bottlenecks, Li said.
Still, like Xiaoice before it, ChatGPT’s ability to riff on any topic has made some companies skittish. While OpenAI does not make its service available in China, a plethora of third party apps using its application programming interface (API) have sprung up, and some tech companies are cracking down.
Tencent’s WeChat has blocked multiple ChatGPT mini programs since the service launched.
One software developer, who declined to be named, said his colleagues launched a ChatGPT mini program on Wednesday only for WeChat to remove it about seven hours later.
A market for OpenAI accounts, which cannot be created using Chinese phone numbers, has also sprung up on e-commerce sites. Alibaba Group Holding’s Taobao showed dozens of listings for such accounts on Wednesday. By Thursday, searches for “ChatGPT” and “OpenAI” returned no results.
It was not clear whether Taobao blocked the searches on its own or whether it was requested by regulators. Taobao and Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Thursday.
Both hype and alarm may have exceeded ChatGPT’s capabilities, though. Shou Chong, a managing director at venture capital firm CCV, during the same panel discussion called the chatbot’s answers “mediocre”. He suggested that the real advancement would come when chatbots can offer insightful answers that do not just repeat information taken from elsewhere.
Xiaoice’s Li has also voiced concerns about cost. In December, Li told the National Business Daily that each ChatGPT query costs OpenAI a few US cents. “Hiring a human to handle queries might cost less,” he said.
Li also noted the trade-off between price and the quality of answers from massive language models. Although numerous large-scale models have been created, their practical applications are limited by high costs and latency, he said.
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