FALCON POWERS – The Biden administration plans to put guardrails on U.S.-developed artificial intelligence (AI) models that power popular chatbots like ChatGPT to safeguard the technology from countries such as China and Russia, Reuters has reported.
But China in the past year has built its own domestic generative AI industry and has been urging its companies to avoid foreign technology.
Here is how reliant China currently is on U.S. AI models and the impact Washington’s plans may have.
HOW ACCESSIBLE ARE OPENAI’S AI MODELS IN CHINA?
OpenAI’s key AI services such as ChatGPT and the DALL-E image generator have not been officially rolled out in mainland China. An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters last year that it was unable to do so in certain countries due to local “conditions”.
However, a large number of companies and engineers have accessed OpenAI’s services using proxy tools like virtual private networks (VPN) to mask their network addresses.
As such, many Chinese companies have been able to build software and applications on top of OpenAI’s models. Chinese companies also frequently benchmark their own AI models against those of OpenAI.
OpenAI has shut down Chinese companies’ access to its service. Last December, OpenAI suspended the account of ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, after technology website The Verge reported that ByteDance used OpenAI’s technology to develop its own AI.
In Hong Kong, China’s special administrative region, access to OpenAI’s AI models is also restricted but it is not airtight. Although OpenAI’s services are unavailable there, Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab, an investor and a partner of OpenAI, has released Copilot, a generative AI service built with OpenAI’s latest technology, to the public. By partnering with Microsoft, companies there can also gain access to OpenAI’s AI models.
