IN THE PAST month or so, China’s tech giants have been showing off. Baidu, Huawei, SenseTime and Alibaba have all flaunted their artificial-intelligence (AI) models, which can power products and applications such as image generators, voice assistants and search engines. Some have introduced AI-powered chatbots similar to ChatGPT, the human-like conversationalist developed in America that has dazzled users. The new offerings have names like Ernie Bot (Baidu), SenseChat (SenseTime) and Tongyi Qianwen (Alibaba). The latter roughly translates as “truth from a thousand questions”. But in China the Communist Party defines the truth.
AI poses a challenge for China’s rulers. The “generative” sort, which processes inputs of text, image, audio or video to create new outputs of the same, holds great promise. Chinese tech firms, hit hard in recent years by a regulatory crackdown and the pandemic, see generative AI as creating vast new revenue streams, similar to the opportunities brought by the advent of the internet or the smartphone.
