The launch arrives at a moment of heightened technological tensions between the US and China as experts and governments struggle to grasp the power of burgeoning AI.
Alibaba is entering the burgeoning generative AI business.
At Tuesday’s Alibaba Cloud Summit, the Chinese tech giant announced its response to ChatGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that quickly became a viral sensation after being launched in late 2022 by San Francisco-based AI lab OpenAI. clarified.
According to multiple reports, Alibaba’s new AI model will soon be incorporated into Alibaba’s full suite of apps. Models Models will reportedly first be integrated into the company’s professional messaging and voice assistant platforms, called DingTalk and Tmall Genie, respectively.
Alibaba is now the third richest company in China, according to data from Companys Market Cap, a website that tracks the value of listed companies.
Similar to GPT-4, the technical framework behind ChatGPT, Tongyi Qianwen is a large scale language model (LLM). Such models are trained to produce specific outputs from vast amounts of data. For ChatGPT and Tongyi Qianwen, the output is language. When a user asks a question in a text-based prompt, the model uses statistical probabilities to generate responses and decide which words to put where.
Chinese tech company Baidu also released its own AI-powered chatbot, Ernie Bot, in March.
The growing effort by Chinese companies to develop new AI technologies follows a final push out of Shanghai, China’s most populous city, as it seeks to establish itself as a pioneer in the Metaverse. It’s 2022, but after that, AI will be significantly overtaken. Last July, the city government announced plans to spend about $1.5 billion on Metaverse-related initiatives.
Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba, also invested heavily in Metaverse-related projects last year.
Fear amid an escalating international AI arms race
After its November launch, ChatGPT quickly became the most popular consumer product in history.
The tool’s unprecedented capabilities and rapid rise to pop culture superstardom have caught the attention of many industry professionals, including marketing. But they also raised concerns.
Italy’s data protection watchdog, also known as Galante, temporarily banned the tool in the country last month, declaring in a statement: Platform dependent algorithms. The organization also raised concerns about the lack of age restrictions within ChatGPT. (OpenAI’s terms of service state that users under the age of 13 cannot use the company’s services, but ChatGPT currently does not have an age verification system within the registration process.)
Concerns have also been raised about the tendency of AI models like ChatGPT to “hallucinate” or generate false information under the guise of truth. Author Yuval Noah Harari, whose work has emphasized the power of language to empower and manipulate humans, warns in a recent op-ed published in The New York Times: It traps us in a Matrix-like fantasy world without shooting anyone or implanting chips in our brains. “
Harari was one of the signatories of a recently published open letter, alongside tech icons such as Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak, urging the AI community to train at least a “more powerful than GPT-4” model. Urge to stop for six months, humanity. (By the way, the letter is signed by at least four Alibaba employees.)
The letter’s authors argue that an arms race to create increasingly powerful AI models among major technology companies such as Google and Microsoft is escalating dangerously quickly.
China’s influence problem
In his op-ed, Mr. Harari expressed concern that slowing the arms race in the West could ultimately give China the upper hand, and that such concerns were ultimately misplaced. claims to be. It may be the very reason the West loses to China,” he wrote.
China’s foray into AI has been hampered by a shortage of graphics processing units (GPUs), a vital ingredient in building LLMs. In September, the US government banned US companies his Nvidia and AMD from selling GPUs to China and Russia. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, Nvidia has since introduced a modified version of his one of its GPUs to evade US sanctions.
For years, US officials have worried about the potential of China’s AI program. At a panel discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January, FBI Director Christopher Wray expressed concern. He says, “I think, ‘Wow, can we do that?’ And I think, ‘Oh my God, they can do that.'”
China’s Cyberspace Administration, the government agency that regulates the country’s internet, issued new rules on Tuesday aimed at controlling the proliferation of generative AI tools. In addition to mandating these tools to comply with national data security laws, the new rules say tools must be developed and used in accordance with “core socialist values,” according to a Reuters report. ing.
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