ChatGPT has become a global benchmark for the Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems market and in that sense today, Sam AltmanCEO of OpenAI, has become the current leader in the sector. But that could change very soon with China’s incursion with platforms like Ernie Bot.
There is no doubt that the release of ChatGPT in 2022 was a true milestone in the technology industry. And it is because of this that the CEO has enjoyed this meteoric fame where his opinion on any matter in the industry has particular weight.
But that could soon change. Only in the West, the excessive success of ChatGPT was such that other alternatives quickly emerged, such as Google Bard either Bing Chatstill based on large language models, but with some more robust functions in different aspects.
Perhaps today the United States and all the systems mentioned above maintain the leadership of the AI industry on this side of the planet.
But that could take a turn very soon, since China has given clear signals that it seeks to enter this field aggressively.
Ernie Bot and the case of China: how they could take over the Artificial Intelligence market
Since August 2023, colleagues from The Verge They told us all the details about Ernie Bot, also known simply as Ernie, the Baidu chatbot that was designed as a kind of Chinese response to the ChatGPT craze.
Little news has reached this continent with impact since that moment, but the reality is that China has already fully entered this technological race and has a good chance of positioning itself at the forefront.
The Asian giant has a great tradition in the development of AI systems, it has a legal regulatory framework that is somewhat twisted in favor of the government, but also more solid than the West and is determined to compete with the United States in this field.
In recent months, several Chinese companies have introduced their own alternatives to ChatGPT. The most notable is Ernie Bot precisely, which is based on a language model trained on a data set of text and code in Chinese.
Due to this, in that country Baidu’s AI has been well received by Chinese users, without reaching the level of ChatGPT. Thanks largely to the fact that the bot is subject to the restrictions imposed by the Chinese government on Artificial Intelligence technologies.
But it is clear to us that if that limit did not exist, it would probably have already surpassed OpenAI. Ernie Bot cannot even access information from foreign sources, which limits his ability to generate complete and accurate responses.
In addition, the Chinese government can review the content generated by Ernie Bot, thereby limiting the freedom of its range of speech, responses, and even geopolitical-cultural perspective on various topics.
But other Chinese companies are developing their own chatbots, such as Tencent and Alibaba, with the company Zhipu AI as the central axis of their projects, which has been working on its own language model, ChatGLM, since 2019.
With such a number of competitors it would be a matter of time before their projects grow as much or more than ChatGPT.