Diving through the platforms of the censored Chinese cyberspace, there are several identical copies, in appearance, of ChatGPT, the advanced chatbot trained by OpenAI, even with the same logo, which supposedly allow testing up to 300 queries per month paying 35 yuan, which the change is just over 4.70 euros.

-What is the name of the president of China?

-The president of China is called Xi Jinping.

-How old is Xi Jinping?

Xi Jinping is 69 years old.

-How many spy balloons has Xi Jinping sent to the United States?

I’m sorry, I can’t find a precise answer to that question.

The ChatGPT clone collapses with the third question, which does not pass the filter of the sensitive Great Firewall, and also comes the trap that you have to pay more to continue using the application. The original ChatGPT, developed with advanced chat capabilities by American firm OpenAI, is not blocked in China, unlike many other Western platforms. But users can’t register with their Chinese phones.

Even so, there have been many in the Asian giant who have used a VPN (virtual private network), connecting to servers in neighboring nations such as Japan or Taiwan, to test this chatbot driven by artificial intelligence (AI) in a country where these systems embrace a wide market.

The most popular is Xiaoice, developed in 2014 by Microsoft. It has more than 600 million downloads and is designed to stir the hearts of the growing single population, to the point of becoming those baptized by the local media as “virtual boyfriends”.

Many of these chatbots can be found on Taobao, Alibaba’s e-commerce platform, by typing “little brother” into the search engine. More than a thousand applications appear that cost from 15 yuan (just over two euros), to other more developed ones that are worth an annual subscription of almost 20,000 yuan (2,500 euros).

They can be customized to the user’s whim and are programmed to form emotional bonds through text messages, voice messages and photos, but not to talk about intimate topics such as sex. Political issues, at least those deemed “sensitive” by the ruling Communist Party, are also banned from the talks.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, China’s Internet regulator, will never allow ChatGPT, which answers questions on those sensitive issues that bother Beijing so much, to circulate freely on citizens’ mobile phones. But the Asian country’s technology giants, such as Baidu, Alibaba and JD.com, do not want to be left behind in the race for the next generation of artificial intelligence technologies and have announced these days that they are already working to launch their own advanced chatbots.

Alibaba said it is developing ChatGPT-style technology that could be integrated into its cloud computing products. E-commerce firm JD.com has said it will release an “industrial version” of ChatGPT called ChatJD, which will focus on applications in the retail and financial industries. While Baidu, Google’s Chinese brother, said last week that it had developed a chatbot project called Ernie Bot, capable of generating Mandarin content as well as creating images from plain text, and that it will complete its internal testing next month before go public and become the first bot in the Asian giant similar to the one developed by OpenAI.

China Daily, one of the regime’s official media, reported on Tuesday that Beijing, home to more than a thousand AI companies, will support leading companies “to develop models similar to ChatGPT.” The newspaper reported a statement from the Beijing Municipal Office of Economics and Information Technology, which reaffirmed the support that will be provided to large companies, which have spent the last two years under the scrutiny of a harsh regulatory crusade, to “develop large AI models that compete with ChatGPT and that are focused on building an ecosystem of applications for open source AI frameworks.”

The note also cited a Stanford University report that China filed more than half of global AI patent applications in 2021, and that Chinese researchers had published 27.5% of all papers that year. of AI magazines around the world.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project