Written by Content Desk, Brand Practitioners• February 9, 2023• 3:41 pm• News, PR

China’s Alibaba joins global chatbot race

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba said Thursday it was working on a rival to ChatGPT, joining a flurry of global tech firms rushing to match the popular AI-powered chatbot.

The development of chatbots capable of mimicking human speech has sparked a rush for AI technology, with tech giants Microsoft, Google, and China’s Baidu leading the charge.

The creation of San Francisco-based company OpenAI has garnered much attention due to its ability to generate essays, poems, and programming code in mere seconds. This has raised concerns over the potential for academic dishonesty among students and the displacement of professionals in the workforce.

Alibaba has begun developing a conversational bot modeled after ChatGPT, which is currently being trialled by its employees, according to a company spokesperson.

However, the spokesperson declined to provide any information on the launch date or if the service will be integrated into Taobao, China’s largest e-commerce platform.

This announcement follows Baidu’s recent declaration that its AI chatbot will finish its testing phase in March.

Microsoft has declared a major collaboration worth billions of dollars with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, with the aim of incorporating the advanced language-based AI capabilities into its Bing search engine.

Google also unveiled a series of AI-driven features on Wednesday. However, the unrestricted ability to generate AI-generated text, audio and video has raised global concern about the risk of identity theft, financial scams, and damage to reputations.

The Beijing government has warned that deepfakes, which utilize technology similar to chatbots to generate eerily accurate digital impersonations, pose a “threat to national security and social stability.”

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