Who are ChatGpt’s Chinese rivals
The latest Chinese antagonist of ChatGpt is called SenseChat and was developed by SenseTime, one of the main companies dedicated to artificial intelligence, to which is also added Tongyi Qianwen of Alibaba, but Beijing seems worried by all this progress and tries to put a brake. All the details
Beijing is responding to OpenAI's ChatGpt chatbot not only with Baidu's Ernie Bot and Alibaba and Tencent's projects, but now also with SenseChat from SenseTime, one of the leading companies dedicated to artificial intelligence (AI).
After yesterday's presentation, the shares of the Hong Kong-based company soared today and its investors include both the Alibaba holding company and the Japanese Softbank Group Corporation.
WHAT SENSECHAT CAN DO
As Bloomberg reports, the CEO of SenseTime, Xu Li, showed how SenseChat – which is based on a large language model ( Large Language Models , LLM) called SenseNova – was able to tell a story by responding to different questions and to help recheck, translate and write computer code, starting with not too elaborate questions in English or Chinese.
The CEO then said that currently human programmers do about 80% of the work in developing AI, but in the future the situation will be reversed, with AI managing 80% of the effort while human beings humans will take care of the remaining 20% to direct and refine.
SenseNova has been described by Xu as “a large language model supermarket” that partners will be able to connect to and continuously update.
THE OTHER REVELATIONS OF SENSESTIME
But SenseTime, in addition to SenseChat, presented a series of new artificial intelligence services developed thanks to the company's access to a large amount of data and the computing power available.
Among them, an image processing tool called Miaohua, literally “draw in seconds”; a product capable of modeling the movements of a human being to animate a digital being in a video called Ruying, or “like a shadow” and, finally, a service for modeling structures that uses AI rendering to generate 3D buildings.
THE REACTION OF THE STOCK MARKET
SenseTime shares rallied 11% today, Reuters reported. Also celebrating are investors such as Alibaba, whose shares rose 3.8%, and Softbank, which rose 0.5%.
But many Chinese companies have benefited from advances in AI, notes the Financial Times . If SenseTime's shares have risen by almost 50% since the beginning of the year, Baidu's shares have also grown by more than 15%.
THE WAR BETWEEN USA AND CHINA
The company, which is under US sanctions, did not provide detailed plans for the launch of the products, but said participants will be able to try them out. In 2019, in fact, the US put SenseTime on a commercial blacklist after accusing it of developing facial recognition programs that facilitate Beijing's surveillance of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region.
On that occasion, recalls Reuters , SenseTime had declared that it strongly opposes the US ban and that it would collaborate with the competent authorities to resolve the situation.
THE ALIBABA CHATBOT AND THE CHINESE REGULATOR'S TIGHTEN ON AI
But even Beijing does not blindly approve of all new technologies, even if they are developed at home. The FT , in fact, says that today the authorities have proposed "new controls on artificial intelligence chatbots, in an attempt to control the way in which the country's technology industry disseminates models of generative AI".
Indeed, just hours after the launch of Tongyi Qianwen, Alibaba's chatbot unveiled today, China's internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has released draft measures that "will likely slow down Alibaba's rollout," fearing the influence chatbots can have on “social mobilisation”.
“The contents generated by the generative AI – wrote the CAC – must embody the fundamental socialist values and there must be no content that subverts the power of the state, advocates the overthrow of the socialist system, incites to divide the country or undermines the unity national".
For these reasons, the regulator has proposed that vendors should submit their products to safety checks before public release and that a database be created to record them. Platforms should also verify the identity of users and allow usage tracking. Baidu's Ernie Bot already requires users to provide their name and national identification number.
Also, according to the FT , "AI stock gains have alarmed Chinese regulators and state media, which have repeatedly warned investors against chasing a speculative frenzy."
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/i-rivali-cinesi-di-chatgpt-e-la-paura-di-pechino-per-intelligenza-artificiale/ on Tue, 11 Apr 2023 13:13:41 +0000.