The Generative AI Push Continues

At the Alibaba Cloud Summit, the Chinese tech giant’s Alibaba Cloud unit revealed its ChatGPT-style product. 🤖

The product, called Tongyi Qianwen, will be available in Chinese and English. It’ll initially be rolled out via several existing products, including its workplace communication software (DingTalk) and its provider of smart home appliances (Tmall Genie).

It will roll out the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot into all Alibaba products in the “near future.” It will also expand more AI features like image understanding and text-to-image soon. However, the company did not specify a timeline for these updates. 📆

Daniel Zhang, chairman and CEO of Alibaba Group and Alibaba Cloud Intelligence, said, “We are at a technological watershed moment driven by generative AI and cloud computing, and businesses across all sectors have started to embrace intelligence transformation to stay ahead of the game.”

As for how the chatbot will be calibrated with proprietary information and data from clients, which will reduce resources and costs. However, it raises the same privacy concerns similar products have been criticized for. 💢

Competitors from Baidu to NetEase have also announced intentions to launch ChatGPT-style products, causing the government to respond.

Chinese regulators, specifically the Cyberspace Administration of China, released draft rules to manage how companies develop generative AI products. This is the country’s first attempt at regulating the new industry that’s taken the business world by storm.

The initial draft attempts to regulate a variety of things. For example, it limits the type of content these products can generate, saying it needs to reflect the core values of socialism and not subvert state power. They should also not generate false information. Additionally, the data being used to train these models should not discriminate against people based on characteristics like ethnicity, race, gender, etc. 📝

Except for the first rule mentioned above, many of these concerns are the same that other countries and stakeholders have expressed. For example, Italy recently banned ChatGPT over privacy concerns and opened an investigation into its creator, OpenAI. On the other hand, Japan is taking a more welcoming approach, speaking directly with OpenAI founder Sam Altman and looking at ways the government can use this technology.

Clearly, this technology is not going anywhere. Even Meta’s CTO says Mark Zuckerberg spends most of his time on AI projects. However, watching how different companies, countries, and other stakeholders approach this disruptive industry is fascinating. Some embrace it, others ban it, and most fall somewhere in the middle. 🤷

As for what’s next, that’s anyone’s guess. But we’ll continue to update you as more information about this industry and its practices emerges. 👍