This post is also available in:
עברית (Hebrew)
The cold war between the U.S. and China continues as China-based AI firm SenseTime reveals it’s GPT-4 competitor in wake of OpenAI ban in China. SenseNova 5.5, which showcased impressive skills at the recent World AI Conference in Shanghai, is claimed by SenseTime to be just as good as GPT-4, the leading AI model from U.S. company OpenAI.
As part of SenseTime’s plan to attract new users, they plan to give away 50 million free tokens, as well as provide staff to help users shift from OpenAI to their own services for free. This step is aimed largely at developers, who suffered the cost of OpenAI’s recent actions to ensure Chinese users would be blocked from accessing its tools and services starting July 9. “We are taking additional steps to block API traffic from regions where we do not support access to OpenAI’s services,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Bloomberg.
Despite ChatGPT already being blocked by Chinese government, developers in China were able, in the past, to access OpenAI’s tools through virtual private networks (VPN). Now, with OpenAI blocking access from their own side as well, Chinese developers are swiftly looking for other options.
As reported by Interesting Engineering, this move has “caused significant concern within China’s AI community,” said Xiaohu Zhu, founder of the Shanghai-based Centre for Safe AGI, underscoring questions raised regarding unbiased access to AI technologies around the world.
However, OpenAI’s ban has actually revealed an opportunity for Chinese AI companies like SenseTime and others to offer their own competing AI products, and these companies are also offering appealing rewards in order to attract OpenAI ex-users. Consequently, OpenAI’s decision to ban their products in China could inadvertently accelerate the rise of Chinese AI companies, which are already fiercely competing with their US counterparts. Currently, China hosts at least 130 large language models, comprising 40% of the global total, second only to the US. Furthermore, according to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), China has filed over six times more generative AI patents than the U.S., making it the leading country in the field.
