Chinese AI applications aim to overtake chatbots!

The World Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Shanghai, July 6, 2023.

Aly Song | Reuters

BEIJING — Many recent launches demonstrate how quickly Chinese companies like DeepSeek and ByteDance have moved to develop artificial intelligence models that can rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Currently, many companies in China are working to expand this base to create products beyond simple chatbots.

Baidu, famous for its search engine and chatbot Ernie, announced Tuesday that its AI-enabled rapid presentation and document creation platform reached 40 million paying users, with revenue up 60%. compared to the previous year at the end of last year. New features, such as the ability to generate a presentation based on a company’s financial statements, have been made available to users over the past week.

According to Ben Yan, analyst and chief data officer at Gartner, more than 10% of companies in China now use AI, up from 8% about six months ago, indicating a notable acceleration — the latest increase of 2 percentage points had taken more than a year, he said on Wednesday.

“Together with our customers, we hear more and more success stories,” he said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. Yan emphasized that AI agents will help accelerate businesses’ adoption of these new technologies.

AI models focus on specific functions, such as search and summary generation, while more advanced AI agents can automate entire processes, from searching to booking. One example is OpenAI’s new “Operator” feature, which claims to be able to make restaurant reservations on behalf of a ChatGPT user.

AI agents are also poised to enter the Chinese market on a larger scale.

Tencent plans to soon integrate AI agents into its messaging and social networking app WeChat, CEO Pony Ma said during a speech to employees on Jan. 13, according to a copy of his annual speech viewed by CNBC.

“We believe China’s AI sector is growing at a pace comparable to that of the United States,” Jo Huang, head of private equity at Raffles Family Office, said in an email. She said her company is considering investing in an AI technology fund in China to capture this local opportunity.

AI application development in China is generating features integrated into domestic smartphones. Apple’s artificial intelligence features have not yet been rolled out to iPhone users in China.

“There is also a shift towards increasing user preference for local brands that can offer advanced AI capabilities tailored to regional consumers,” Wei Sun, senior artificial intelligence analyst at Counterpoint Research, said in an email. THURSDAY.

She pointed out that Chinese smartphone companies like Honor, Xiaomi and Vivo have been able to improve user experience when it comes to AI features, with efforts to optimize the efficiency of AI models that can run on the device without requiring internet-connected cloud services.

The latest developments also illustrate a difference in regulation compared to the United States and the nature of the technologies created.

Baidu’s Ernie bot, similar to ChatGPT, only gained approval from Beijing for a public launch in August 2023, almost a year after ChatGPT became a global sensation.

Although AI models must obtain official certification to be used in China, their application is much simpler, said Alex Lu, founder of Shanghai-based consultancy LSY. At the same time, he is working with a small team on an AI-powered tool intended to provide businesses with targeted insights into market trends and global regulations, similar to the work of a human consultant.

Six months after its development began in June 2023, Lu said the team began testing a product for free with potential customers, including a car battery maker. This helped garner feedback for a product the team hopes to sell for between 70,000 and 100,000 yuan (about $9,660 to $13,790) in annual licensing fees, Lu said.

However, a major challenge lies in the ability of companies to provide access to their confidential data or to commercially use AI-generated content.

“I think that the [multinationales] are much more cautious than Chinese brands because of copyright and legal issues,” Chris Reitermann, CEO of Ogilvy Asia Pacific and Mainland China, told CNBC last year. He is also president of WPP China.

He said his clients had attempted to use AI for campaigns but encountered compliance issues that prevented them from launching their projects. “Local brands may be a little less worried in this regard, instead preferring a trial-and-error approach,” he added.

Some AI applications created in China are also used abroad. Alibaba’s international arm announced earlier this month that Accio, its AI-powered search engine for product sourcing, had reached 500,000 small business users.

Launched in November, Accio allows businesses to use a few text or image queries to find products in bulk, while providing them with analytics on their popularity with consumers and projected profitability.

Accio has reduced search time from several weeks to about a day, said Mike McClary, who gained early access to Accio and has been selling camping lanterns and other products online for more than 10 years. . McClary, CEO of amazing.com, claims to have generated more than $1 million in online sales annually, and is based near St. Louis, Missouri.

He added that Alibaba.com and Amazon, which he previously used, involved sifting through hundreds or thousands of results, before negotiating individually with five to 10 suppliers before deciding. The “next game changer,” according to McClary, will be using AI to integrate a product image into any scenario to create an ad.