supercat
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Actually, Baidu's ChatBot will be launched in March, while 360 Security Technology and Alibaba's versions are under development and testing.
News on China's scientific and technological development.
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I think OP brings up a prescient point though about whether China can break the mold of other East Asian tech superpowers. Japan and South Korea for all the years they've been tech superpowers have proven extremely adept at perfecting existing technologies and taking market share away from Western companies, in some cases even becoming hegemons in certain fields like Japan did with automobiles. What they have not been as succesful in however, is developing tech that revolutionizes the way we live, like the Smart Phone or ChatGPT.
And this leads into the next point, I see sentiment from pro-China circles that as long as China cracks semiconductors it has the tech game in the bag over America. That's most certainly not the case. Even taking the advantage of immigration out of the equation, America has an intrinsically entrepeneurial culture that drives people to make breakthroughs like ChatGPT. I would go as far as to say even if Biden was overthrown in an extreme right wing coup tomorrow and all immigration to America was stopped, America would suffer but would still have many structual advantages over China.
This technological Cold War won't be an easy battle by any stretch of the imagination. And with respect to ChatGPT, I've read some opinons online that when it comes to language AI, America has the insurmountable advantage since English is the world's lingua franca and that there's simply more data for ChatGPT to go off on. Because lets get that out of the way, ChatGPT is essentially wikipedia if it can autogenerate essays based on its databases, its not a machine capable of doing the thinking of a human being. China could probably pull ahead in robotic AI and other areas, but those breakthroughs won't happen for a while. Be optimistic as China has many advantages of its own, but do know its not going to be a walk in the park.
That's why China needs to work on some moonshot projects. Just take a medium sized team of good scientist, give them a large budget, a large timeframe and an impossible goal and see what they come up with in a decade.
Baidu's artist AI. Tell it what to draw, it will draw it. The more detailed your description, the better.
Yet somehow this isn't considered as impressive as some chatbot.
I bet if China came out with the chatbot and some certain country came out with the art bot, they'd say "China made some glorified customer service interface while that certain country made the digital Leonard Da Vinci."
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Isn't that kind of what the Soviet Union relied on? All these groundbreaking developments are happening in the private sector, that's not up for debate. China needs a stable entrepeneurial environment where whiz kids and their circle of friends, with a vision, are willing to take the risk that is doing the legwork in networking and building the connections/vc funds necessary to get their ideas off the ground. Emphasis on risk because even in America, 90% of such ventures fail or at best end up being sold to a bigger company. But amidst all that, there's always the one that emerges to change the way the game is played.
In order to take risk, one need not necessarily be confident that their idea will come to fruition, but at least they need to be confident that the environment they operate in will allow their idea to flourish if they play their cards right. And sadly, let's be honest with ourselves here, the zero Covid policy and tech crackdown of last year wasn't exactly all that helpful in contributing to such an environment. So for the sake of China's future, let's hope 2023 will bring about the changes needed to get the entrepeneurial environment back on track.
Up to a point. Rampant neoliberalism has not always been working well for the US, e.g. capitalist owners pushing companies to maximise shareholder buybacks to increase dividends instead of re-investing into R&D.
Besides, if you study the history of Silicon Valley, then it's pretty clear it was birthed thanks to US govt intervention. First funding from universities which in turn got their grants from Uncle Sam and later Pentagon buying the bulk of semiconductors early on. The pivot to the private market didn't happen in earnest until decades after being established in the 1940s.
The Soviet Union didn't have a competitive market economy. China's economy is more akin to Western Europe during its socialist heyday of 1950-1970 when the state had a much bigger say but there were still big private companies. I'm talking only of the economy here, the political systems are a different story.
And it was built off the same imaging models as DALL-E, which came out a years earlier. Like it or not, nobody remembers the 2nd or 3rd person, everybody remembers the first to do something. 99% of people can't remember the name of the 3rd person to walk on the moon. And like it or not, China has been 2nd on a lot of the transformative tech that has come out recently. And a lot of it has been from small teams.
Spacex is a faction of the size of NASA and ULA, they made reusable rockets first despite the latter's billions in funding and decades in experience. Boston dynamic's robotic tech is decades ahead of google and Amazon, despite being a small team with a fraction of the funding. RNA vaccines were developed over 30 years by a small team of researchers and were picked up by two small companies before covid hit. OpenA.I is beating out tech giants 20 times their size and funding. That's the whole point of this new emerging technology spaces, small teams can beat out much larger ones, provided they get a good head start and enough funding.
If that's the case, there's really no reason why chinese scientists couldn't have made the breakthoughs themselves.
Stop living life with such a booeyman. If china comes out with a good product, nobody denies it. Look at BYD cars, tik-tok, DJI drones, nothing but praise most of the time.
And large natural language/multi-modal models like GPT/DALL-E would not be possible without Chinese image model ResNet which allowed to build such deep models in the first place by introducing the idea of residual/skip connections to effectively propagate gradients to deeper layers. This finally allowed to match the theory to practice because previous models all suffered from decaying performance with model growth despite the theory stating that deeper models should be at least as good as shallow models. It is the most cited DL research paper, far ahead of transformers - the basis of GPT and other modern NLP models (also uses residual connections btw).
Same response as always:
China is at a different developmental and wealth accumulation stage than the US
and . They didn't have to. If they simply took no action, SpaceX wouldn't have gone anywhere. . if they were truly internally profitable, why are they still looking for external investors? Let's go with their stated reasons: to invest in new tools and technology. Yet I don't see Intel begging VCs every time they buy a new lithography tool. First reusable rocket was the space shuttle's SRB.
Whether Boston Dynamics is transformative or not is yet to be seen, as they're mostly making money by being acquired from company to company, and so far I don't see many sales. Google bought them then sold them within a few years for a reason. I don't see how they're any more transformative than say, KUKA. KUKA actually makes money from selling their robots though, rather than their company's ownership. Perhaps you meant Boston Dynamics has a transformative business model in that regard, of selling ownership in hopium, rather than physical products.
Then you have Enron, FTX, Theranos, etc that all claimed to be transformative.