According to a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Computing Technology, China's AI industry is falling behind in the race to create chatbot models like ChatGPT due to a lack of vision.
The statement comes as questions about why the country appeared caught off guard by developments in large language models that made OpenAI's ChatGPT a global sensation and sparked intense competition around the technology, South China Morning Post tells us in a report.
Researcher Explains Why China Is Lagging the AI Race
Baidu and Alibaba, two multinational corporations, are striving to lead China's AI revolution. Recently, Baidu unveiled its latest offering, Erniebot, which is touted as one of China's earliest rivals to ChatGPT, with huge promises for users.
Despite the hype surrounding its launch, reports suggest that Ernie, the AI chatbot, is not meeting expectations, especially for those already familiar with this technology.
According to CAS researcher Bao Yungang, there are numerous reasons for China's AI industry's lag, ranging from the need for visionary leaders and top-tier teams to sufficient funding.
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He also highlighted OpenAI's shift in 2019 from a non-profit company to one with profit capped at 100 times investments as a significant contributor to its success.
Major Challenges
SCMP notes that one of the major challenges facing China's AI industry is the lack of investment in fundamental research. Liang Zheng, deputy head of Tsinghua University's China tech policy research center, stated that no Chinese company is investing heavily in fundamental research, which is essential for innovation.
Zheng suggests that China needs to cultivate a new market environment supportive of innovation and encourage those with a long-term mindset to work on fundamental and explorative work that could eventually lead to something meaningful.
Other Factors
As Big Tech firms have rushed to develop similar AI products, China has yet to produce a true ChatGPT rival to Microsoft-backed OpenAI. Bao attributed this to the approach taken by OpenAI, which focuses on finding a lot of small wins and multiplying them together.
Despite lagging behind the US in producing effective machine learning systems, China is the leading producer of AI research. According to the latest Artificial Intelligence Index Report released by Stanford University, the country produces more AI journal, conference, and repository publications than any other country.
In total AI funding, China is second only to the US, although it invested a third as much at US$13.4 billion compared with US$47.4 billion in the US.
However, experts have identified censorship limitations in China as possible contributing factors to issues in training models such as those powering ChatGPT. These models can provide unpredictable and frequently inaccurate responses to questions.
Nonetheless, Bao Yungang believes that Chinese companies could eventually rival OpenAI if they find a lot of small wins and multiply them together over time.
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