- Alibaba will offer its own version of ChatGPT
- Baidu will do the same
- Chinese tech giants follow in the footsteps of their American rivals
No one wants to be left out. While the big US tech companies are all eyeing ChatGPT and generative AI technologies, their Chinese rivals are following suit. It is in this sense that we must interpret the communication from Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, which announces that it will soon launch its own version of conversational AI.
The company also specifies that it has already been working internally on this project since 2017. Questioned by our colleagues from CNBCa spokesperson explained: “As a technology leader, we will continue to invest in transforming cutting-edge innovations into value-added applications for our customers as well as their end users through cloud services. »
Baidu and NetEase on the trail of ChatGPT
If no timetable is provided for the moment, Alibaba should in any case make its users benefit from this technology soon. The announcement follows NetEase’s announcement on Wednesday that its education subsidiary Youdao is working on generative AI and may use some models in its apps in the future.
Baidu, the “Chinese Google”, will launch an equivalent of ChatGPT on its search engine in March. Users will thus be able to have a conversational interface on the model of what OpenAI already offers. The name of this new tool is “Ernie bot”.
It will be understood, the major Chinese technology companies do not want to miss this phenomenon which seems to mark a major break like search engines or the launch of social networks.
“Connecting” ChatGPT to the Internet is difficult
Opposite, Google and Microsoft are of course not left out. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft introduced Prometheus, the new AI that will be integrated into Bing and Edge, saying: “The race starts today”. We feel in his words that something very important is being played, and that the cards are somehow reshuffled.
For its part, Google has unveiled Bard, its chatbot which will also be directly integrated into its search engine. The Mountain View firm, however, intends to leave a few months before launching it to avoid certain blunders.
There is nothing to say that the “connection” of a ChatGPT type language model to the Internet is smooth. OpenAI’s AI is indeed very well framed and does not connect to live information. The success of such an operation is not yet certain.
