Alibaba Introduces ChatGPT Rival, Integrated Across Platforms

0:00Ever since the recent ban of ChatGPT by the Chinese Communist Party, there's been a lot of speculation about what is going to replace it in China. the chinese communist party believes that chat gpt is an american propaganda tool um and so you know they just out up or flat out banned it obviously right you can ask it all sorts of questions about history um this is going to make it a lot more difficult for china to censor right they have a pretty strong censorship on the internet where they can block specific pages talk about specific topics that put them in a bad light but with something like chat gpt because it could spit out anything or any piece of information there's no way for them really to ban it without going straight to OpenAI or Microsoft and kind of, you know, ratcheting up the levers of economics they have and trying to get them to actually remove certain things, which would have a lot of criticism as these tools are used all over the world.

0:52Maybe they would have to make a special model just for different countries. It would get a little bit messy and definitely put OpenAI and Microsoft in a bad light. So because this was an unlikely situation, the Chinese Communist Party decided that they would just rather flat out ban it. it's not in the hands of an American company and that seems to be the way that China likes it right with bans on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and everything else big that came out of America so they flat out banned it but this left a really big hole in the market a lot of people were wondering what was going to replace it a lot of different Chinese companies announced that they were going to come up with competitors and so it's leaving a lot of people you know questioning will China be able to actually come up with better versions of chat GPT or something even similar so So recently, China's Alibaba group announced that it is going to, it actually announced that it had a generative AI model and it actually started showing it off to people.

1:47So its version of this tech chatbot is said to be integrated into all of the company's apps in the near future, which is going to be really big for China. It's called Tongyi Queenwen. It's an AI large language model, and it's essentially used to do a ton of different things in their demo. You know, they had it drafting invitation letters, planning trip itineraries, and advising shoppers on types of makeup to purchase. And, you know, this is all the same kind of stuff we've seen from ChatGPT, nothing new. And an interesting thing is when they did their big launch, this is something I always look out for, is was this a live demo or was this a film demo?

2:26So in this case, it was a filmed demo, meaning, I mean, essentially, meaning it could be just completely fake that they have it. I'm not saying that that's the case, but film demo doesn't mean anything because anyone can, you know, go use Adobe Premiere and just make a fake film thing. And all the answers are perfect because you just put the answers in your video. So I'm extremely unimpressed with filmed demos. That being said, this thing looks like the same technology. If it wows anyone, I don't think that they're following AI very closely because it would appear that OpenAI is already miles ahead of them with GPT-4 and plugins and everything that they're already integrating into.

3:02that being said it's initially going to be integrated into ding talk which is essentially Alibaba's workplace messaging app like slack or Microsoft teams and it can be used to summarize meaning notes write emails and draft business proposals it's also going to be added to Tmall Genie which is Alibaba's voice assistant right like Google Voice or Alexa or Siri the technology as they say will bring about big changes to the way we produce the way we work and the way we live our lives as the CEO Daniel Zhang he told a live streamed event that and the AI models like this are part of the big picture for making AI more popular in the future he added so I mean I don't know in my opinion this thing is I mean essentially a knockoff of chat GPT and like I'll try not to be too pessimistic because obviously every AI model that comes out is going to appear to be a knockoff but I'm just really unimpressed when people come out with the exact same technology that does the same thing worse, essentially, like an older version, just because, you know, government regulation allowed them to get in.

4:06And so I think in America, we're going to have to see companies that are competing against OpenAI do things like, you know, make it more safe or more accurate or better at math or specialize in different areas. And China at the moment is obviously just benefiting from the fact that it's flat out banned and they could put out something that's you know we saw stanford data scientists spent six hundred dollars trained an ai model off of facebook's new infrastructure lambda and they spent 500 bucks on open ai credits used 35 000 questions and answers from open ai's chat gpt and they literally made a pretty decent clone of chat gpt for 600 bucks so like that being said i'm incredibly unimpressed when people are just doing very very basic language models chat gpt like this stuff is uh i mean it seems like it's rocket science but because open ai has already done so much work building out um sophisticated models it is not hard to uh to follow in their footsteps and so i'm unimpressed until they're doing something new or innovative other than what's been available for the last you know four months with open ai so obviously global interest in generative ai is at an all-time high right now um microsoft backed chat gpt and gave him like 10 billion dollars so this is something that has been really hot um and open ai and chat gpt actually were really popular in china for a for a moment before it was all banned but a whole bunch of other chinese companies also revealed or teased they have ai models or chat box in the works so their search giant beidu announced it has something called ernie bot um they announced this earlier this year but still that is only in trial for different users that are essentially signed up for their, you know, pre-trial.

5:50And that's kind of similar to Google and Google Bard. They haven't really opened that up to the masses yet. On Monday, a Chinese AI company, SenseTime, they unveiled a bunch of new AI products and they also have a chatbot called SenseChat. So the CEO of Alibaba and a bunch of other companies working on ai models um are kind of like at the starting line of this whole new phenomenon in china right the the growth was stunted we're seeing this in other countries too banning it like italy and other you know germany is talking about in a couple other european countries it's gonna be interesting to see if these companies that ban it fall completely behind because obviously open ai has the most money and it's been doing it the longest they have a way bigger head start and uh you know people might try to make models in their own native countries But at the end of the day, OpenAI and ChatGPT have a massive head start financially and in just the data and the talent that they have to build this thing out.

6:47So I'll be incredibly shocked if anyone can catch up to them without, you know, playing ball and really trying to work in the same space. It's interesting to note that shares of Alibaba went up about 1.5 % when they announced this. and shares of SenseTime, which initially surged a whole bunch, were later down like almost 3 % after they announced theirs. So, you know, it would appear that their product was not received with all the hype. And to be honest, this doesn't really shock me. I'm going to be pretty, I'll be pretty shocked if, you know, these announcements are really helping any of these major tech companies really crank their stock prices up or their valuations up a lot, just considering that a lot of people are able to do this people are understanding how it's done um ai models can be trained for relatively cheap nowadays and so unless they're doing something innovative is this isn't really something that's an incredibly brown uh groundbreaking but it's going to be interesting to follow what happens in china and around the world as these ai models develop maybe they'll come out with some um really specialty tech or incredible things that other people are not doing so only time will tell and it will be an interesting space to watch