ChatGPT lookalikes proliferate in China

ChatGPT is big in China, even though it's not officially available there.

China's obsession with ChatGPT runs deeper than curiosity. Search giant Baidu Inc. is preparing to launch its competitor, Ernie Bot, in March. It will embed the tool initially into its search services and smart speakers.

Amid the fervour, Alibaba Group, NetEase and Tencent each promised similar initiatives in the span of a few days, stirring Chinese tech stocks from a years-long slump. The government in Beijing, where Baidu is based, has vowed to give more support to such efforts.

This is the first time in probably more than a decade that Chinese internet firms are all racing to adopt, localise and perhaps advance a Silicon Valley invention on the level of Google, Facebook or YouTube.

Microsoft's Bing and Alphabet's Google — which showed its artificial intelligence search assistant called Bard — appear to have an early lead. But both products exhibit many flaws.

Rolling the services out too soon could create problems for Bing and Google. Doing so in China could be disastrous. Appeasing the country's complex censorship machine is difficult enough for search and social media companies. Trying to keep a malleable AI bot in check is a new kind of challenge.

But just like in the US, where Microsoft has committed $10 billion to OpenAI, there's plenty of money in China to ensure someone gets this right. Wang Huiwen, who co-founded the Chinese food delivery giant Meituan, said Monday that he is investing $50 million in a startup seeking to build "China's OpenAI". The catch is that Wang knows nothing about AI, needs to recruit a group of experts and lists "studying AI" on his online bio.

It's worth noting that around this time last year, Wang had posted that he was "studying crypto."