Soon after OpenAI’s chatbot was released, Chinese tech companies started building chatbots for themselves. Among them, search engine Baidu’s artificial intelligence technology chatbot ‘Ernie Bot’ may come next March.
In the past few days, at least five Chinese tech companies, including Baidu and e-commerce giant Alibaba, have announced the creation of chatbots similar to ChatGPT’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology. In this regard, a spokesperson of Alibaba said that the company is conducting experimental activities of AI chatbot internally.
In March, Baidu announced the official unveiling of its artificial intelligence technology chatbot named ‘Ernie Bot’. Hong Kong-based game entertainment company NetEase is working to bring applications like ChatGPT in the limited situation of internet usage in China. It will be used for educational purposes. Chinese e-commerce platform Jade.com (JD.com), on the other hand, said it will release an ‘industrial version’ of ChatGPT called ChatJD, which will focus on applications in retail and financial institutions.
However, Kay Yan, the Chief Researcher of DigiTT Research, a Singapore-based research institute, said that there may be legal complications after the creation of chatbots made by Chinese technology companies. Because, China’s laws on data and privacy protection are still quite vague. Questions may arise about what kind of data will be used to train the algorithm or whether intellectual property laws are being violated to answer users’ questions.