Can China Catch Up With ChatGPT?

Beijing is scrambling to keep up with the U.S. in the all-important race for supremacy in artificial intelligence.

- NICHOLAS GORDON

"WHEN IS THE BEST AGE for a woman to get married?" In a viral post in March on Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, one user posed that awkward question to two A.I. chatbots: ChatGPT, the buzzy service developed by OpenAI, and the more recently unveiled Ernie Bot, from Chinese tech giant Baidu.

ChatGPT framed its response diplomatically. "The answer to this question varies with factors such as culture, religion, region, and personal background," the bot wrote in Chinese. "It's important that women think carefully and consult others before making a decision."

Ernie Bot was far more blunt. "The best age to get married is between 20 and 25," it wrote. After that age, a woman's value "will decrease day by day, and her body will also go downhill."

It was just one in a series of unflattering comparisons for the Chinese chatbot. In the months since, Baidu says, it has improved the technology underpinning Ernie Bot to the point that it now outperforms OpenAI's when operating in Chinese.

Chinese companies, large and small, invested heavily in A.I. over the past decade. Yet the breakout success of ChatGPT appears to have surprised Chinese tech giants, and now they're rushing to catch up.

The debate is about more than just a chatbot. Whichever country wins the A.I. arms race could corner a lucrative share of the global economy potentially worth trillions of dollars, and get an edge in the military competition between Beijing and Washington.

A.I. "has become a proxy in the battle for primacy between China and the U.S.," says Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London, and "whoever inches ahead in this form of technology gets benefits in terms of wealth, power, and influence."

And that puts China's tech giants in an uncomfortable position between a Beijing that wants to mold the global internet in its favor, and a Washington determined to keep Chinese tech a few steps behind.