Hamartia Antidote
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Well if it is only using Chinese sources we can expect huge gaps in its knowledge
www.scmp.com
Internet and artificial intelligence (AI) giant Baidu, the first Chinese company to launch an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has started to embed the service on its flagship online search product, as other major tech firms around the world race to bring similar tools to market.
The beta version of Baidu’s new “AI Mate” chatbot – comparable to Microsoft Corp’s Bing Chat – recently appeared at the top right side of the Chinese search engine’s landing page for certain users. It adopts the technology from Ernie Bot, the ChatGPT-like service that Baidu unveiled in March.
Once opened, AI Mate would tell users to provide “feedback to help it improve”. It also cited only domestic references and avoided political queries, according to a run-through of the new feature by the South China Morning Post on Friday.
AI Mate’s lack of resources from outside China led to some inaccurate answers. For example, AI Mate cited Google, Replika, Character.ai and even Baidu in its reply to a query on which US firms have developed ChatGPT-like bots.
It generated that answer from a blog on online tech forum Chinese Software Developer Network and an article from PConline, which were both published in February. These Chinese entities are not known as credible media sources.
By comparison, Microsoft’s new OpenAI-powered Bing responded to the same query with Facebook owner Meta Platforms, Google, Microsoft and social media firm Snap, while leaving out smaller tech providers.
Bing Chat cited articles published in April and March from various sources, including American basic cable business news channel CNBC and the official site of Democratic US Senator Michael Bennet from Colorado
The limitations of Baidu’s AI Mate reflect how Chinese tech firms are walking a fine line to abide by Beijing’s efforts to regulate and rein in the rapid development of generative AI services on the mainland, while making the most of the technology’s advantages.
Generative AI, which falls under the broad category of machine-learning systems, consist of algorithms such as what ChatGPT uses to create new content, including text, images, video, audio, code and simulations.
Given existing restrictions on the mainland, Baidu’s AI chatbot avoids a direct response to political questions. When asked to assess Chinese state leaders, the service simply said: “The content violates rules that it will not answer.”
But answering the same query, Bing Chat said it “cannot provide an opinion on this matter”, citing that it is an AI language model. Still, its response offered relevant reports from The New York Times and CNN.
Internet regulator the Cyberspace Administration of China last month published a new set of draft rules that require companies providing generative AI services in the country to uphold Chinese socialist values and refrain from generating content that suggests regime subversion, violence or pornography, or disrupts economic or social order
Apart from Baidu, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, AI firm SenseTime and voice recognition developer iFlyTek have launched their own alternative services to ChatGPT. Alibaba owns the Post.
While there have been disagreements over how far China is behind the US in generative AI, iFlyTek founder and chairman Liu Qingfeng said over the weekend that its product, SparkDesk, would surpass ChatGPT in the vast Chinese-language market by October
Baidu co-founder and chief executive Robin Li Yanhong, meanwhile, has described a certain two-month gap that exists between the capabilities of ChatGPT and its own AI chatbot. “We may catch up soon, or that may never happen,” Li told employees last week.
Chinese AI experts have indicated that some of the obstacles to China’s progress in large language models (LLMs) include the complexity of the Chinese language, the government’s censorship of sensitive topics and lack of computational power.
LLMs, according to AI chip designer Nvidia, are deep-learning algorithms that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate text and other content based on knowledge gained from massive data sets.
Baidu embeds ChatGPT-like service on flagship online search engine
Given restrictions on the mainland, Baidu’s AI Mate generates content based only on domestic references and avoids political queries.
www.scmp.com
- The beta version of Baidu’s new AI Mate chatbot appears at the top right side of the Chinese search engine’s landing page
- Given restrictions on the mainland, AI Mate generates content based only on domestic references and avoids political queries
Internet and artificial intelligence (AI) giant Baidu, the first Chinese company to launch an alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has started to embed the service on its flagship online search product, as other major tech firms around the world race to bring similar tools to market.
The beta version of Baidu’s new “AI Mate” chatbot – comparable to Microsoft Corp’s Bing Chat – recently appeared at the top right side of the Chinese search engine’s landing page for certain users. It adopts the technology from Ernie Bot, the ChatGPT-like service that Baidu unveiled in March.
Once opened, AI Mate would tell users to provide “feedback to help it improve”. It also cited only domestic references and avoided political queries, according to a run-through of the new feature by the South China Morning Post on Friday.
AI Mate’s lack of resources from outside China led to some inaccurate answers. For example, AI Mate cited Google, Replika, Character.ai and even Baidu in its reply to a query on which US firms have developed ChatGPT-like bots.
It generated that answer from a blog on online tech forum Chinese Software Developer Network and an article from PConline, which were both published in February. These Chinese entities are not known as credible media sources.
By comparison, Microsoft’s new OpenAI-powered Bing responded to the same query with Facebook owner Meta Platforms, Google, Microsoft and social media firm Snap, while leaving out smaller tech providers.
Bing Chat cited articles published in April and March from various sources, including American basic cable business news channel CNBC and the official site of Democratic US Senator Michael Bennet from Colorado
The limitations of Baidu’s AI Mate reflect how Chinese tech firms are walking a fine line to abide by Beijing’s efforts to regulate and rein in the rapid development of generative AI services on the mainland, while making the most of the technology’s advantages.
Generative AI, which falls under the broad category of machine-learning systems, consist of algorithms such as what ChatGPT uses to create new content, including text, images, video, audio, code and simulations.
Given existing restrictions on the mainland, Baidu’s AI chatbot avoids a direct response to political questions. When asked to assess Chinese state leaders, the service simply said: “The content violates rules that it will not answer.”
But answering the same query, Bing Chat said it “cannot provide an opinion on this matter”, citing that it is an AI language model. Still, its response offered relevant reports from The New York Times and CNN.
Internet regulator the Cyberspace Administration of China last month published a new set of draft rules that require companies providing generative AI services in the country to uphold Chinese socialist values and refrain from generating content that suggests regime subversion, violence or pornography, or disrupts economic or social order
Apart from Baidu, e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, AI firm SenseTime and voice recognition developer iFlyTek have launched their own alternative services to ChatGPT. Alibaba owns the Post.
While there have been disagreements over how far China is behind the US in generative AI, iFlyTek founder and chairman Liu Qingfeng said over the weekend that its product, SparkDesk, would surpass ChatGPT in the vast Chinese-language market by October
Baidu co-founder and chief executive Robin Li Yanhong, meanwhile, has described a certain two-month gap that exists between the capabilities of ChatGPT and its own AI chatbot. “We may catch up soon, or that may never happen,” Li told employees last week.
Chinese AI experts have indicated that some of the obstacles to China’s progress in large language models (LLMs) include the complexity of the Chinese language, the government’s censorship of sensitive topics and lack of computational power.
LLMs, according to AI chip designer Nvidia, are deep-learning algorithms that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate text and other content based on knowledge gained from massive data sets.
