Technology

➚ MOVE FAST: Temu. The Chinese-owned e-commerce app made a splash with its first Super Bowl ad, which told consumers to “Shop Like A Billionaire.” The bold marketing move suggests that Temu isn’t fazed by rising tensions between Washington and Beijing — at least for now.

➘ BREAK THINGS: TikTok. More Democrats are voicing support for banning the Chinese-owned video platform in the U.S. “It’s something that should be looked at,” Senator Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in an interview with ABC News on Sunday.

The drop in prices for information technology products last month compared to a year ago, according to the latest U.S. consumer price index. The figure doesn’t necessarily indicate that computers and smartphones are getting more affordable: The Bureau of Labor Statistics accounts for improvements in products, so if the price stays the same for a better model, its value is considered to be declining. Fans of the latest iPhones probably don’t see it quite the same way.

Why China has yet to release a rival to ChatGPT

THE NEWS

The sudden rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has caused a frenzy in China, prompting tech giants like Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba to announce their own alternatives and sending the stock price of Chinese artificial intelligence companies soaring.

While the Microsoft-supported chatbot is technically blocked in China, its overnight success has sparked a wave of copycats in the country’s tech sector, which only recently began emerging from a prolonged government clampdown.

LOUISE’S VIEW

China’s rush to emulate ChatGPT demonstrates that it remains largely a follower when it comes to developing advanced forms of artificial intelligence, and the United States is still the trailblazer. For the past decade or so, Chinese research institutions and companies have often iterated on the latest AI models roughly one to two years after their American competitors led the way.

This time, Baidu will likely be the first Chinese firm to follow in OpenAI’s footsteps. The company says it is nearly done testing a chatbot named Ernie, which is based on a large language model Baidu introduced in 2019. The company plans to release Ernie next month and integrate it into its main search engine, mirroring Microsoft’s plans to integrate ChatGPT into Bing.

But the similarities largely stop there. Baidu and other tech companies in China are operating in a vastly different regulatory, political, and cultural environment than the one OpenAI is in the U.S. While the Chinese government is eager to help foster homegrown innovation, it has also been aggressive in regulating new technologies. Over the last few years, it has introduced a series of new rules designed to protect consumers and ensure tech giants can’t amass powers that threaten the state. Some of the challenges facing Chinese AI companies include:

• Concerns around content moderation: The Chinese government requires tech companies to censor many forms of politically sensitive content. That makes it incredibly dangerous to release a free-wheeling product like ChatGPT, whose outputs are frequently inaccurate and often impossible to predict, despite safeguards OpenAI put in place.
  • “Policy-wise, it is much more difficult for Chinese companies to just throw something out into the wild like U.S. companies can do here,” said Rui Ma, founder of the investment consulting firm Tech Buzz China. “Whatever becomes available to the public in China will likely be much more limited to start.”
  • Baidu has already released a censored image generator similar to OpenAI’s DALL·E that refuses to produce pictures of Tiananmen Square or Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Ernie Bot, however, may prove harder to control, particularly since it was reportedly trained on Chinese and English material from both inside and outside China’s Great Firewall. “How long could this possibly last until somebody gets it to spit out something that is so politically non-permissible?” said Graham Webster, editor-in-chief of the DigiChina Project at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center.
• The regulatory environment: Unlike the U.S., China has already enacted national regulations dictating how artificial intelligence programs can be used. Last month, for instance, the country’s so called “deepfake law” went into effect.
  • It requires that companies label all forms of synthetically generated media — in other words, the outputs of models like ChatGPT or DALL·E. “If Baidu is going to try to release something in this genre, it will be navigating a new regulatory system that has significant risk if you get it wrong,” said Webster.
• Recent export controls: In October, the U.S. government announced sweeping rules limiting the export of advanced computer chips to China. In the long run, the regulations could make it harder for the country to develop cutting-edge forms of artificial intelligence.
  • Over the next few years, though, Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace studying China’s AI ecosystem, said they are unlikely to put China at a significant disadvantage.
• Brain drain: Chinese research institutions struggle to attract and retain the most talented people in the world working on artificial intelligence. While the country produces around 30% of leading AI researchers overall, the majority of them go on to live, work, and study in the United States, according to the think tank MacroPolo.
  • As tensions between the U.S. and China grow, Chinese researchers may be more reluctant to operate in the U.S. But for now, China’s high number of migrants remains a huge advantage for American firms.
• The local research culture: Sheehan pointed out that there is a much longer tradition in the U.S. of conducting open-ended AI research than there is in China. Tech companies in the People’s Republic “are just more constrained by the profit motive,” he said. That means it can be harder to start firms like OpenAI, which originally began as a non-profit research organization whose sole purpose was to develop advanced artificial intelligence.

Still, Sheehan expects China will probably be able to recreate something like ChatGPT relatively quickly. “It might not be exactly as good or as high-performing,” he said. “The U.S. does continue to be the first one to put these products out there, but they just very quickly proliferate to the other cutting-edge AI labs in other parts of the world.”

Last year, for example, researchers at Tsinghua University — China’s top school — published GLM-130B, a state-of-the-art large language model that outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-3 model released two years earlier. But since then, OpenAI has been working on an even more powerful version called GPT-4, which is predicted to outshine the Tsinghua model that came before it.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

A Microsoft executive told journalists last week that the U.S. was only months, not years, ahead of China in artificial intelligence research. They said the state-backed Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) was one of three global leaders in the sector, with the others being the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, as well as Google’s DeepMind.

And Ma pointed out that China’s AI ecosystem is unique, and will likely continue developing in different ways from the West. “With the Chinese internet being much richer in video, you could make the argument that with guardrails in place, Chinese engineers could make more breakthroughs in video just due to user behavior and ecosystem differences,” she said.

THE VIEW FROM BEIJING

Beijing’s municipal government announced Monday it would offer support to companies developing AI programs that can compete with ChatGPT. The capital city’s legendary Zhongguancun neighborhood, nicknamed “the Silicon Valley of China,” is home to heavyweight research institutions like BAAI and the Institute of Automation.

NOTABLE

• The newsletter Recode China AI put together a list of generative artificial intelligence projects that Chinese tech giants have announced so far. It also rounded up 14 new AI startups in China, with each valued at over $1 billion.
• Chinese AI researchers have expressed a range of opinions about ChatGPT, which Jordan Schneider translated in his newsletter, ChinaTalk.

Many popular TikTok influencers are known for filming strangers they see in public, sometimes without their knowledge. A Buzzfeed article recently dubbed the phenomenon “the age of panopticontent,” a time when everything and everyone can easily be converted into another viral post. A new survey finds that the majority of people in the U.S. are not fans.

Startup Replit launches a ChatGPT-like bot for coders

THE SCOOP

Software developers will have access to a powerful new technology starting Wednesday: The ability to converse with an AI bot similar to ChatGPT that has been  trained by startup Replit to help write computer code.

The first-of-its kind technology called Ghostwriter Chat by the software development service is another way the latest version of AI is shaking up the way we live and work.

Founded in 2016, Replit is like Google Docs for developers, allowing them to write and collaborate on software in real time. It also offers a “bounty” service in which companies or individuals can ask the Replit community to create specific code for a fee.

“Coding turned out to be almost the perfect use case for LLMs,” Replit co-founder and CEO Amjad Masad told Semafor in an exclusive interview, referring to the “large language models” that power technology such as ChatGPT.

Masad believes the software will give the most skilled coders the ability to create “one-person billion-dollar companies” by exponentially increasing their ability to build complex software programs, including new artificial intelligence-enabled businesses.

The updated AI features include a “debugger” that will tell programmers when they’ve made a mistake in their code and offer suggested changes. Ghostwriter can also test-run the code to make it work.

The chat bot and real-time debugger are features that haven’t yet been introduced in Copilot, a feature in Microsoft’s GitHub that can autocomplete lines of code by predicting what a developer is planning to write. Copilot is powered by OpenAI’s Codex AI model.

“There’s definitely a race between us and Microsoft,” Masad said. “We’ll be first. They’ll probably copy us.”

He said the end goal for Replit is to create a “completely autonomous” AI coder that can be treated like a human software engineer. It’s aiming to create an early version of that within a year.

REED’S VIEW

Replit is an example of the kinds of new companies that will emerge from the latest advances in AI.

Replit’s advantage isn’t a new breakthrough in artificial intelligence itself. It is data.

Replit has dozens of companies using the “bounty” service, describing in plain English the software they want to build, and the 20 million coders who have used its service have written 240 million software programs. It also offers software hosting, so it can see how consumers use it. That whole process combined makes for a gold mine of data that can be used to train AI models on how to properly create computer code.

Right now, the company says its Ghostwriter is like a junior programmer. But if Replit can amass more data and continue to improve the model, Ghostwriter will get better over time.

Replit hopes that head start will give it a lead, or a “moat” to fend off competitors, even Microsoft’s GitHub, an industry juggernaut.

If Replit is right, and it’s possible to give developers an unprecedented leap in capabilities, it could lead to massive change.

Juan Ruiz, a 21-year-old developer in Phoenix, Arizona, has been using a beta version of the Ghostwriter chatbot to build software for his own AI startup, called Crear.AI, a content creator assistant that is particularly good at translating to and from Spanish.

Ruiz said he’s tried GitHub Copilot but that Ghostwriter is a more powerful tool, allowing him to instantly “spin up” software. About 70% of the time, the code just works. When it doesn’t, he rephrases the description or tweaks it manually. “It’s been a game changer for me,” he said. Building the startup “would have been harder and slower,” were it not for the AI help.

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT

Replit will face a myriad of challenges in the road ahead.

Researchers have found that code generated by OpenAI’s Codex contained security vulnerabilities 40% of the time.

Stack Overflow, a question-and-answer site for coders, temporarily banned users in December from sharing responses generated by AI and ChatGPT. “The primary problem is that while the answers which ChatGPT produces have a high rate of being incorrect, they typically look like they might be good and the answers are very easy to produce,” Stack Overflow wrote.

Rachel Woods is founder of The AI Exchange and a former Facebook data scientist.

Fortnite maker Epic Games accused Google of violating the terms of an Indian antitrust order requiring the tech giant to make space for third-party app stores within its Play Store, Reuters reported. Epic said it’s being “adversely affected” by the move as it explores launching its Games Store app on the Google platform. Google argues it’s following the local legal process. The battle royale will likely be heard soon by an appeals panel in New Delhi.

Top Gun: Maverick was the breakout movie of 2022, with its “man versus machine” plot line. In the opening scene of the movie, a Navy admiral nicknamed “The Drone Ranger” tries to ground our high-flying protagonist in favor of unmanned aircraft.

When Maverick is told he’ll soon be replaced by a drone, he quips: “Maybe so, but not today.” Unfortunately for the Mavericks out there, it looks like “today” is getting closer. The U.S. Department of Defense’s research agency (DARPA) announced its artificial intelligence algorithms can now fly an F-16 and, yes, they will soon demonstrate an AI “dog fight.” We know national security is important, but can’t help but mourn the end of the Top Gun era.

— Reed

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— Reed and Louise