At the World AI Conference in Shanghai last week, SenseTime, one of China's leading artificial intelligence companies, unveiled its latest model, the SenseNova 5.5.
The model demonstrated her ability to identify and describe a stuffed toy dog (wearing a Sense Time cap), give feedback on a drawing of a rabbit, and quickly read and summarize a page of text. According to SenseTime, SenseNova 5.5 is comparable to GPT-4o, the flagship artificial intelligence model of Microsoft-backed American company OpenAI.
If that wasn't enough to entice customers, SenseTime is also giving away 50m free tokens – digital credits for using AI – and says it will help new clients move from OpenAI services to SenseTime products for free. will deploy staff to
Chinese efforts to lure domestic developers away from OpenAI – considered the market leader in generative AI – will now be a lot easier, after OpenAI informed its users in China that they can access its tools and services from July 9. Use will be prohibited.
“We are taking additional steps to block API traffic from regions where we do not support access to OpenAI services,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg last month.
OpenAI has not elaborated on the reason for its sudden decision. ChatGPT is already blocked by a government firewall in China, but as of this week developers can use virtual private networks to access OpenAI's tools to fine-tune their own creative AI applications. You can go and benchmark your research. Now the block is coming from America.
Rising tensions between Washington and Beijing have led the US to ban exports to China of certain advanced semiconductors needed to train cutting-edge AI technology, putting pressure on other parts of the AI industry. Is.
Zhao Huo Zhou, founder of the Shanghai-based Center for Safe AGI, said the OpenAI initiative has “raised significant concern within China's AI community,” not least because “the decision is a global It raises questions about equal access to technologies”. .
But it's also created an opportunity for homegrown AI companies like Sensetime, which are scrambling to scoop up OpenAI's rejected customers. After warnings about OpenAI's decision last month, Baidu offered 50m free tokens for its Ernie 3.5 AI model, as well as free transfer services, while another local company, Zhipu AI, offered its own model. Offered 150m free tokens. Tencent Cloud is giving away 100m free tokens for its AI model to new users until the end of July. “Competitors are offering migration paths for former OpenAI users, seeing it as an opportunity to expand their user base,” Zhu said.
One consequence of OpenAI's decision could be to accelerate the growth of Chinese AI companies, which are in fierce competition with their American rivals as well as each other. It is estimated that China has at least 130 major language models, accounting for 40 percent of the world's total and second only to the United States. But while American companies like OpenAI are on the cutting edge of generative AI, Chinese companies are engaged in a price war that some analysts speculate is hurting their profit margins and ability to innovate. can Still, New York University professor Winston Ma, who writes about Chinese technology, said OpenAI's departure from China “comes at a time when major Chinese tech players are closing the performance gap with OpenAI and offering these Chinese LLM models basically for free”.
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“OpenAI's departure is a short-term shock to China's market, but it may provide a long-term opportunity to put Chinese domestic LLM models to the real test,” Ma said. So far, Chinese companies have focused on commercializing major language models rather than developing the models themselves, he added.
Chinese observers are keen to play down the implications of the OpenAI decision. State media outlet Global Times said it was “a push by the US to curb China's technology development”. Pan Helan, a digital economy researcher at Zhejiang University who sits on a government technology committee, called the development “a good thing for China's large-scale model of independence and self-reliance,” according to Chinese media.
But there are signs that US sanctions on China's AI industry are beginning to loosen. According to a report by The Information, online video giant Kwaishu recently had to limit the number of people who could access its new text-to-video AI model, Killing, because of a shortage of chips. due to reduced computing capacity from , according to a report by Information. And now there's an increasingly hidden market for U.S. semiconductors, as companies look for ways to circumvent sanctions. Being blocked by American software can similarly stifle creativity.