Hong-Kong:
The Biden administration plans to place guardrails on US-developed artificial intelligence (AI) models that power popular chatbots such as ChatGPT to protect the technology from countries such as China and Russia, Reuters reports.
But China has built up its own domestic generative AI industry in the past year and has urged its companies to avoid foreign technology.
Here's a look at how dependent China currently is on US AI models and what impact Washington's plans could have:
HOW ACCESSIBLE ARE OPENAI'S AI MODELS IN CHINA?
OpenAI's key AI services, such as ChatGPT and the DALL-E image generator, have not yet been officially rolled out in mainland China. An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters last year that this was not possible in certain countries due to local “circumstances.”
However, a large number of companies and engineers have accessed OpenAI's services using proxy tools such as virtual private networks (VPN) to mask their network addresses.
As such, many Chinese companies have managed to build software and applications on top of OpenAI's models. Chinese companies also regularly compare their own AI models with those of OpenAI.
OpenAI has cut off Chinese companies' access to its service. Last December, OpenAI suspended the account of ByteDance, the Chinese owner of TikTok, after technology website The Verge reported that ByteDance was using OpenAI's technology to develop its own AI.
In Hong Kong, China's special administrative region, access to OpenAI's AI models is also limited, but not foolproof. Although OpenAI's services are not available there, Microsoft, an investor and partner of OpenAI, has released Copilot, a generative AI service built with OpenAI's latest technology, to the public. By working with Microsoft, companies there can also gain access to OpenAI's AI models.
DO CHINA'S AI MODELS USE ANY US TECHNOLOGY?
The US Commerce Department's move targets the export of proprietary or closed source AI models, whose software and data on which it is trained are kept secret, the sources told Reuters. Open source models would fall outside the scope of export controls.
However, China relies heavily on many open source models developed in the West, such as Meta Platforms' 'Llama' series.
In March, the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, a high-level research laboratory, was quoted by Chinese state media as claiming that the majority of China's homegrown AI models were in fact built using Meta's Llama models and that this posed a major challenge to the Chinese economy. AI development.
The laboratory told Chinese Premier Li Qiang at the time that China has “a serious lack of autonomy” in the area.
In November 2023, 01.AI, one of the most high-profile AI unicorns in China founded by Google's former director Lee Kai-fu, faced major backlash after some AI engineers discovered that its AI model Yi-34B had been built on Meta's Llama. system.
That said, a host of Chinese tech companies such as Baidu, Huawei and iFlytek have been working to develop their own “completely proprietary” AI models. Some of them claim that their models have become as capable as OpenAI's latest GPT4 model in several areas.
WHAT IS BEIJING'S POSITION ON US AI MODELS?
Chinese authorities, in line with an order from Chinese President Xi Jinping to develop technological self-sufficiency, have emphasized the need for the country to develop its own 'verifiable' AI technology.
The state-backed China Daily newspaper said in a post on Chinese microblogging site Weibo last February that ChatGPT could “provide a helping hand to the US government in spreading disinformation and manipulating global narratives for its own geopolitical interests.”
The country has also been proactive in rolling out regulations for the use of generative AI, requiring services to obtain government approval before releasing them to the public. Since January, China has approved more than 40 AI models for public use, but none were foreign AI models.
Last April, a senior Hong Kong government official also said the city has no plan to allow the use of ChatGPT within local government.
The Chinese government's positive sentiment towards US generative AI technology is mainly focused on comparing the extent to which China lags behind the US in AI development, rather than encouraging US AI technology.
At the country's annual parliamentary meeting last March, a minister used a football analogy to describe ChatGPT's large lead over Chinese AI products.
“Playing football means dribbling and shooting, but it is not easy to be as good as Messi,” Chinese Science and Technology Minister Wang Zhigang said, referring to Argentine superstar Lionel Messi.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by Our staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)