The global buzz around Microsoft’s chatbot ChatGPT has spread to China, bolstering stocks in AI-related firms and prompting a flurry of local companies to announce competing projects.
Chinese tech giants such as Baidu and Alibaba, as well as smaller start-ups, have been working on AI projects for years, similar to Microsoft and Google. Chatbots in China are mostly used for social interactions, whereas ChatGPT, which learns from massive amounts of data how to respond to user prompts in a human-like manner, excels at more professional tasks like programming and essay writing.