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Two Sessions 2023
ChinaScience

China is playing catch-up in a ChatGPT world, Chinese lawmaker says

  • The country needs to advance its own cognitive development models, which are far behind the best competitors, iFlytek founder says
  • Getting there means firming up its software and hardware foundations, he says

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Large language products will “likely be the biggest leap in artificial intelligence technology”, according to one NPC deputy. Photo: Shutterstock
Ling Xinin Beijing
China should speed up the development of its own ChatGPT-like language models to benefit industry and the public alike, a top Chinese legislator has urged.
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Hailing large language products as “likely the biggest leap in artificial intelligence technology”, Liu Qingfeng, founder and chairman of voice recognition firm iFlytek, said China’s cognitive intelligence models still lagged considerably behind the best chatbots in the world.
Given the enormous industrial opportunities and vast social impacts of such models, as well as the ever-growing hi-tech race with the United States, China must have a strategy to catch up to and even overtake the US in some areas, Liu told China Electronics News at the National People’s Congress in Beijing on Saturday.

He said that in the future, ChatGPT would be not only a chatbot but an artificial intelligence assistant revolutionising life from the way information was distributed to human-computer interaction, “allowing everyone to become more creative on the shoulders of AI”.

Liu said that while research institutions and businesses in China had released a number of large language models, they still needed to work out systematic issues such as general-purpose pre-training and reinforcement learning from human feedback.

China, ChatGPT and the new AI tech revolution

To quickly close the gap with the US, state-level special projects should be set up to support a long-term, steady innovation system to bring together industry and academia – including newly established national laboratories – to tackle the development and upgrade of cognitive intelligence models, he said

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