Another ChatGPT Competitor Appears in China

iFlytek is a Chinese voice recognition company. (Photo: Bloomberg)

At an event in Hefei, iFlytek Chairman Liu Qingfeng unveiled SparkDesk, an artificial intelligence (AI) model foreducation and business. Users can use English and Chinese commands to ask the chatbot to evaluate student essays and create a hypothetical story about Confucius attending the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Audience members had the opportunity to ask the chatbot questions at the presentation. Liu said the company's goal is to beat OpenAI in Chinese and match ChatGPT's standards in English.

Also at the event, Mr. Liu assessed that the impact of AI technology is no less important than the birth of the PC or the Internet. “We need to do our best to learn from ChatGPT” and even “find a way to surpass it,” he said.

SparkDesk’s launch comes as Beijing has released draft regulations requiring security assessments of generative AI services. While investors initially cheered the big language modeling announcements from Baidu and SenseTime, they have grown increasingly skeptical of the bubble. At a meeting last month, Chinese officials stressed the need to pay attention to the development of generative AI while mitigating risks.

There are also concerns about Chinese companies’ long-term access to high-end chips. IFlytek was banned from buying key US components after being blacklisted by the US Department of Commerce in 2019. In addition, Chinese companies have had difficulty training chatbots because they have to ban information deemed sensitive or controversial.

Big names like Baidu and Alibaba have said they will integrate AI into their product suite, similar to how Microsoft integrated ChatGPT into the Edge browser and Google integrated Bard into search results.

(According to Bloomberg)

Running ChatGPT costs more than $700,000 per day According to The Information, the cost of running ChatGPT can be around $700,000 per day, and Microsoft is looking to fix this.

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