The World Conference on Artificial Intelligence was held in Shanghai on July 6, 2023.
Aly Song |Reuters
BEIJING – Last week’s releases show that Chinese companies such as Deepseek and Bytedance have moved quickly with artificial intelligence models to compete with Openai’s ChatGPT.
Currently, many companies in China are increasingly building on their foundation to develop products that consider going beyond chatbots.
Baidubest known for its search engine and Ernie chatbot, on Tuesday announced that its generative AI-integrated Wenku platform for quickly creating PowerPoint and other documents will reach 40 million paid users. This is a 60% increase from a year ago at the end of last year. . Updated features, including using AI to generate presentations based on a company’s financial filings, began rolling out to users last week.
On the corporate side, Gartner Data and Analytics Director Analyst Ben Yan estimates that more than 10% of China is using generative AI, up from 8% about six months ago. It will be a pace pick-up — the last two-point increase in adoptions took more than a year, he said Wednesday.
“With our clients, we hear more and more success stories,” he said in Mandarin, translated by CNBC. Yan pointed out that so-called AI agents can help speed up corporate implementation of new technologies.
AI models focus on specific functions such as searching or generating summaries, while AI agents are more advanced. Automate the entire process, from search to reservation. One example is OpenAI’s new “Operator” feature, which claims to be able to make restaurant reservations on behalf of ChatGPT users.
AI agents are coming to the Chinese market on a large scale.
tencent Pony MA will soon integrate its AI agents with the messaging and social media app WeChat, it told staff in a Jan. 13 speech, according to a copy of the annual address seen by CNBC.
“We believe China’s AI sector is advancing at a pace comparable to the US AI sector,” Jo Huang, head of private equity at Raffles Family Office, said in an email. She said the company is considering investing in China’s leading AI deep tech fund to capture local opportunities.
China’s AI application development creates features that are integrated with domestic smartphones. Apple’s AI intelligence capabilities are yet to come to iPhone users in China.
“There is also a shift towards user preference for local brands that can offer advanced AI capabilities tailored to local consumer preferences,” Wei Sun, principal artificial intelligence analyst at CounterPoint Research, said in an email Thursday. It is stated in
She said Chinese smartphone companies such as Honor, Xiaomi, and Vivo are helping users with AI capabilities thanks to efforts to improve the efficiency of AI models that can run on devices without relying heavily on internet-connected clouds. We pointed out things that could improve your experience. service.
Compliance hurdles
The latest developments also reflect regulatory scrutiny and differences in the types of technologies being created with the United States.
Erniebot, like Baidu’s ChatGpt, didn’t get Beijing’s green light for public deployment until August 2023, nearly a year after ChatGpt took the world by storm.
Although AI models must receive official certification for use in China, they are much easier to use in applications, said Alex Lu, founder of Shanghai-based LSY Consulting. On the side, he works with a small team on AI-driven tools to provide targeted companies with daily insights on industry trends and global regulations, as well as the work of human consultants.
Six months after development began in June 2023, Lu said the team has started testing the product for free with potential customers, including car battery manufacturers. With this, the team wants to charge 70,000 yuan in annual license fees to 100,000 yuan ($9,660-13,790).
But the bigger challenge is to allow companies to give AI access to their own data or use AI-generated content commercially.
“Because of copyright and legal issues, (multinationals) are much more cautious than Chinese brands,” he told CNBC late last year, who is also president of WPP China.
He said his clients have tried to use AI in their campaigns, only to run into compliance issues that prevent the project from launching. “Local brands, they might be a little worried about these issues, more trial and error,” he said.
AI for global users
Some Chinese-created AI applications are also used overseas. alibabaEarlier this month, Accio, an AI-powered search engine for product sourcing, announced it had reached 500,000 small business users.
Accio, launched in November, allows businesses to find wholesale products using a few text or image prompts. Provides analysis on popularity to consumers and projected benefits.
Accio has cut research time from weeks to a day, according to Mike McClary, who got early access to Accio and has been selling camping lanterns and other products online for more than a decade. McClary, CEO of Amazing.com, claims more than $1 million in e-commerce sales annually and is based out of St. Louis, Missouri.
He said Alibaba.com and Amazon, which he previously used, involved negotiating with five to 10 suppliers individually before settling on one, going through hundreds or thousands of results. According to McClary, the “next game changer” is using AI to create ads by putting product images into any scenario.
