By SHE Xiaochen
ChatGPT, the chatbot developed by OpenAI, reached 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after its launch. It took Tik Tok nine months and Instagram two and a half years to reach the 100 million MAU threshold.
Smart answers to tough questions
It seems like now almost all Chinese tech companies are developing conversational AI now. Baidu is launching “Ernie Bot” in March, embedded in its search engine.
Youdao, the NetEase search engine is developing an AIGC-based service to help with the education business.
Alibaba’s path is more conversational. Its chatbot was developed by DAMO Academy, Alibaba’s AI research arm. A screenshot widely circulated online showed a conversation with a chatbot about who is the all-time greatest basketball player. The bot offered a pretty smart answer.
JD.com and Qihoo 360 also said they are planning to launch chatbots.
So far, so uneventful
Though none of the tech giants has launched anything of note so far, the hype will not recede any time soon, and has spread to the stock market. AI companies with little relevance to AIGC technology saw their shares up.
Shares of Hanwang Technology, an e-book maker, jumped by the daily limit of 10 percent on Tuesday, the seventh consecutive session it reached that limit. Even though Hanwang’s natural language processing and optical character recognition – keys to a chatbot – only contributed 13 percent of the company’s revenue in the first half of 2022.
Nothing to do with us
Hanwang took full advantage of the situation and released a statement that said NLP is vital to the company's future, but others are more cautious.
Cloudwalk Technology issued a statement after its shares doubled in seven days, saying it had not worked with OpenAI, nor had the company generated any revenue from ChatGPT-related services and products.
