State-sponsored Chinese AI firm launches bot service to ‘surpass’ ChatGPT

cointelegraph.com:

Iflytek, a state-subsidized Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company, recently announced the launch of “Spark Model,” an AI system designed to compete directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The launch took place at a tech event in HeiFei called “Spark Desk,” and featured a full demonstration of the new system’s capabilities.

.#China's leading intelligent speech and artificial intelligence (AI) company iFLYTEK launched its generative language model on Saturday. The company said it will keep updating it to a version better than the rival ChatGPT by Oct.. pic.twitter.com/zjSrPbAXKy

Per a translation provided by Bing Translate, Iflytek founder and president Liu Qingfeng told event attendees that the Spark Model — also referred to as the “cognitive big model” — represented the “dawn of general artificial intelligence.”

While there’s no scientific consensus on whether general artificial intelligence (also referred to as artificial general intelligence or AGI) is even possible using current machine learning techniques, the billionaire tech mogul did offer  a comparison to ChatGPT and a timeline for updates:

Details about the underlying technology powering Spark Model are scarce as of the time of this article’s publishing, but company president Liu Qingfeng described the AI’s capabilities as “far ahead of the existing system that can be measured in China.”

Direct comparisons between ChatGPT and similar models can be difficult to make without side-by-side benchmarking. Not only does OpenAI keep training details and other proprietary information under wraps, but ChatGPT is also banned in China — a fact that limits OpenAI’s ability to train its models on Chinese languages and culture.

The current ban on ChatGPT in China has been