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ChatGPT has created a sudden fervor for conversational AI in the tech industry, and everyone wants to be the master of it. Alibaba is the latest company to enter this race. The Chinese tech giant is reportedly conducting internal testing of its ChatGPT competitor. It hasn’t officially announced a launch date for the solution, which doesn’t yet have a name, at least not known to the public.
A spokesperson for Alibaba told the popular Chinese publication South China Morning Post, which Alibaba acquired for a reported fee of $266 million in December 2015, that the company is internally testing its conversational AI chatbot in Damo Academy. It is an Alibaba-owned research institute located at Nanhu Science Centre in Hangzhou city. Established in 2017, the 228,100 sq. meter site is dedicated to research programs in cutting-edge technologies, including AI.
According to South China Morning Post, Damo Academy introduced a natural language processing model with 27 billion “parameters” in April 2021. These parameters are a measurement of an AI chatbot’s capabilities. ChatGPT is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3) family of large language models that was launched in 2020 with 175 billion parameters. So Alibaba’s solution is a lot less capable as things stand.
However, the company is still developing its conversational AI. By the time it arrives in the market, the company may improve it a lot. Damo Academy has already announced a new “M6” AI model known labeling it as the world’s first “10-trillion-parameter” pre-training model. It’s unclear whether this model is ready for prime time yet. We should hear more about Alibaba’s ChatGPT competitor in the coming months as the company progresses with its development.
Alibaba is just one of many tech companies developing a ChatGPT competitor
OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30 last year. In two months, the service raked in more than 100 million users globally. More than the popularity of the conversational AI chatbot, it’s its capabilities that have put established tech companies on their toes. Many see it as the future of search. Google, being the world’s largest search company, quickly got working and launched Bard a few days back. The service is currently in closed beta but will be available to the public in the coming weeks.
Chinese search giant Baidu has also announced its ChatGPT competitor. Called the Ernie Bot, the company plans to launch the service next month. Other Chinese firms working on AI chatbots include Tencent Holdings, JD.com, and NetEase. Google’s Bard made a costly mistake (a factual error) during its first demo, costing the company $100 billion in market value. It appears there’s still plenty of work to do for the search giant. It will be interesting to see how this market shapes up over the next few months.
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