Here are China’s bets on the AI chatbot race

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The AI race is officially on, and China’s no slouch.

Since ChatGPT broke into the scene with its public test launch, a slew of contenders announced their own versions of an AI-powered chatbot. One of the biggest ones is Google with Bard, but a demo the company itself launched showed the bot churning out an error – sending its market share crashing the same day by US$100 billion.

Companies from China, which is home to numerous global tech powerhouses, have been pouring out plans to offer their own flavors of AI chatbots. However, they may see rougher roads ahead, as regulators have reportedly told the likes of Tencent and Alibaba to specifically forego offering any ChatGPT-like services.

Nonetheless, here’s a roundup of OpenAI’s rising Chinese competitors.

Baidu (Ernie)

• The Google competitor named its offering Ernie, which is short for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration.
• Ernie was first introduced in 2019 by a team of researchers at Tsinghua University. It was designed for tasks such as language understanding, developing analyses, and answering questions, much like OpenAI’s offering.
• Baidu chairman and CEO Robin Li has announced that the company would fully integrate Ernie across all of its operations, including Baidu Search and Baidu AI Cloud.
• The company recently said that testing on its latest model is slated to end by March. It was reported that Baidu’s looking to launch the bot in the same month.

Microsoft’s Xiaoice (X-CoTA)

• Xiaoice – the US tech giant’s independent AI research team in China – started testing its own AI-powered chatbot, X-CoTA, on February 21.
• The company said its toll can obtain and save data in real time. It’s also less computing power-hungry, lowering the cost of training for developers.
• Li Di, CEO of Xiaoice, said that if it followed ChatGPT’s method, X-CoTA would cost the firm US$43 million a day to run.

Tencent

• The company recently confirmed that it’s working on a ChatGPT-style program.
• Tencent has not shared much detail on its plans, but it said that R&D on the tech is running along “in an orderly manner.”

NetEase

• The gaming giant’s education subsidiary Youdao is working on its own ChatGPT-like bot.
• While not much is known right now about the program, CNBC said the tech may be integrated into Youdao’s education offerings.

Alibaba