ChatGPT Lookalikes Proliferate in China

F-22Raptor · Feb 15, 2023

Chinabots

“Who’s Xi Jinping?” I asked ChatGPT.

“The content you shared may include sensitive characters,” it replied. “Please fix and resend your question.”

I wasn’t talking to the original chatbot created by Microsoft Corp.-backed startup OpenAI but a version of it running on the Chinese super-app WeChat. Any developer can pay OpenAI a small fee to access parts of ChatGPT and plug it into their own apps. Like many others in China, I’ve been drawn to this WeChat mini program to sample the hype.

When I asked the chatbot why ChatGPT isn’t available directly in China or Hong Kong, it cited “government restrictions on certain online services.” The WeChat-native version appears to take extra effort to satisfy Beijing’s censors. Asking it to write a poem about China is fine, but one about the Communist Party is not.

I'm not the first, and likely won't be the last, to point out how China's onerous censorship regime might hamper longer-term efforts to build next-generation search and AI engines. And yet, the country's biggest internet players appear intent on finding a way.

China’s obsession with ChatGPT runs deeper than curiosity. Search giant Baidu Inc. is preparing to launch its own competitor, Ernie Bot, in March. It’ll embed the tool initially into its search services and smart speakers.

Amid the fervor, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., NetEase Inc. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. each promised similar initiatives in the span of a few days, stirring Chinese tech stocks from a years-long slump. The government in Beijing, where Baidu is based, has vowed to give more support to such efforts.

This is the first time in probably more than a decade that Chinese internet firms are all racing to adopt, localize and perhaps advance a Silicon Valley invention on the level of Google, Facebook or YouTube.

Microsoft Corp.’s Bing and Alphabet Inc.’s Google — which showed its own artificial-intelligence search assistant called Bard — appear to have an early lead. But both products exhibit many flaws.

Rolling the services out too soon could create problems for Bing and Google. Doing so in China could be disastrous. Appeasing the country’s complex censorship machine is difficult enough for search and social media companies. Trying to keep a malleable AI bot in check is a new kind of challenge.

But just like in the US, where Microsoft has committed $10 billion to OpenAI, there’s plenty of money in China to ensure someone gets this right. Wang Huiwen, who co-founded the Chinese food delivery giant Meituan, said Monday that he’s investing $50 million in a startup seeking to build “China’s OpenAI.” The catch is that Wang knows nothing about AI, needs to recruit a group of experts and lists “studying AI” on his online bio.

It’s worth noting that around this time last year, Wang had posted that he was “studying crypto.”