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A number of companies, including major players like Google and Meta, have been working on generative AI technologies for years now. But while the technology had so far been largely unavailable to the general public, OpenAI made it accessible to all for the first time with the launch of ChatGPT in November. Soon after, big tech was scrambling to incorporate similar technology into its products.
However, the lion’s share of AI-related discourse these days is about chatbots developed in the United States. On the other side of the globe, China is just as invested in AI development. Artificial Intelligence appears to have become the centre of the power struggle between the two belligerent nations. Experts suggest that the AI war between the two countries may even grow as complex and entangled as the ongoing silicon chip war.
Below, we take a look at the companies that are presently dominating the generative AI space in China and the US.hat
The San Francisco-headquartered AI powerhouse has either created or is involved in the top generative AI products in use today. The company consists of a non-profit and a for-profit entity that collaborate on various projects. Some of its notable products include GPT-4, a powerful language model; Codex, a system that can write code from natural language; and DALL·E, a system that can generate realistic images from text.
Microsoft has been pouring billions into generative AI development through its partnership with OpenAI. The company has harnessed the power of GPT-4 and other LLMs to incorporate generative AI into several of its existing products like search engine Bing, office suite Microsoft 365, and browser Edge. The company has also integrated AI into services like Azure OpenAI Service and Power Platform, enabling developers and businesses to leverage generative AI for various use cases, such as natural language processing, hyper-personalization, and generative design.
Google has been invested in generative AI development for years now. Last year, the company’s LaMDA LLM convinced an engineer that it was sentient, leading to controversy. More recently, the search engine leader has launched its own AI chatbot, Bard, powered by its TensorFlow framework. Google Cloud has also launched a range of products that infuse generative AI into its offerings, empowering developers, businesses, and governments to build gen apps.
The e-commerce giant has partnered with Hugging Face, an AI startup developing a ChatGPT rival, and has also been working on its own AI products for a long time, such as Alexa and Amazon Lex.
Social media giant Meta has been investing in AI research since 2013 and has made significant progress. The company in late February announced LLaMA, a set of foundation language models that range from 7B to 65B parameters. The company plans to monetise these by December, joining Google in exploring practical applications. Some of Meta’s other products include image segmentation tool SAM and video generator Make-A-Video.
Chinese search giant has Baidu has launched a chatbot called Ernie with 260B parameters, more than ChatGPT’s 175B. Ernie Bot will be able to generate texts and images in both English and Chinese, with the company claiming the bot outperform other language models in various tasks, such as language understanding and generation. A number of partners that will leverage Ernie’s technology, ranging from EV companies to media platforms, have already been identified.
Alibaba, a technology company specialising in e-commerce, is in the internal testing stage of developing its own ChatGPT-style chatbot. The project is being undertaken by Alibaba’s DAMO Academy, a research institute that handles the company’s research in AI and other emerging technologies.
Huawei, another multinational technology corporation known globally for its smartphone offerings and 5G tech, recently patented technology to detect user input behaviour. The company describes it as a “man to computer conversation system,” which would work like ChatGPT. However, Huawei hasn’t yet revealed prospective use cases or products building upon the patent.
Tencent, the world’s largest video game vendor, is developing its own ChatGPT-like chatbot called HunyuanAide. HunyuanAide will be based on Tencent’s own large language model, Hunyuan, which is said to be very good at understanding Chinese and better than humans in some tasks. Tencent has not revealed many details about HunyuanAide, such as when it will be launched, how it will be used, or how big its model is.
JD, one of China’s largest e-commerce companies announced in February that it plans to launch a ChatGPT-style product. The company will release an “industrial version” of ChatGPT called ChatJD that will focus on the fields of retail and finance. The product will be able to generate content as well as allow human-to-computer conversations, JD said.
As the world becomes more reliant on artificial intelligence technologies, the competition between the United States and China in this field is only set to grow fiercer. The list of top AI companies in both countries reflects the progress each country has made in the field of generative AI — and it remains to be seen how this ongoing AI war will shape the future of technology and global power dynamics.
