The recent launch of Chat GTP prompts a big scramble by mainland big tech. finews.asia tries to find out what is going on.

OpenAI’s Chat GTP shouldn’t be raising the furor that it is in China. As in Hong Kong, you shouldn’t even know what it is and how it works without using a virtual private network and browsing anonymously.

Still, that hasn’t stopped many of the country’s largest players on the other side of the digital iron curtain to announce they will launch their competitors to the world’s first widely available AI chatbot.

It has also prompted share prices to go everywhere, but mainly higher, at least when any of them indicate they may have a potential bot skulking somewhere in the depths of their research and development departments.

Generative AI

But what do we know? Not all that much. An Alibaba spokesperson told CNBC last week that it was working on a Chat GTP competitor.

Although it was news that sent its shares 3 percent higher, was there anything on their website? No, except for a paper released in January about the top ten trends for 2023 where it mentioned generative AI, the overarching technology that future smart bots will supposedly grow up in.

Their version of all this, however, if it ever results in a bot, sounds like a very boring cousin of Chat GTP’s. The kind of bot you don’t want to talk to at any party, and much less engage with. The clear impression they left from the CNBC statement is that they have been caught entirely flat-footed by Open AI’s discursive, plain language approach.

Ernie and Wenxin

Then we have Baidu. At least the search engine has decided to give their future AI progeny a name. According to the combined might of the world’s financial and tech media, clearly in a frenzy (collated search results), it will be called «Ernie» in English and «Wenxin Yiyan» in Chinese. Anything on their website? No.

After that, it all gets murkier. Some smaller companies ostensibly linked to the AI industry such as Beijing Haitian Ruisheng Science and CloudWalk were warned by the Shanghai Stock Exchange (Mandarin only) for irregular movements in their share price.

In short, there is very little to see here, at least for now.

The Future of Work

Still, these are heady days. Chat GPT has grown faster than anything else in tech history by some accounts. At the same time, Google received its first black eye in living memory, and $100 billion in market cap, by losing the first round of the chatbot wars last week with its Bard entry (collated search engine results), which wasn’t quite ready for the big leagues.

So − what’s the connection with banking and finance? This is all a microcosm of the future of work, and maybe even art. Chat GPT can already write school essays and conjure up basic poetry, and stories, even if they are relatively simplistic. On social media, many are saying that the future of recorded music, which has been completely digitalized for decades, belongs to those who can use state-of-the-art AI tools the most creatively in the studio.

Pre-defined Rails

In the same fashion, banks with large-scale businesses, mainly in retail, have employed dumber bots for well more than half a decade to make sure that clients end up on pre-defined rails when it comes to making standardized requests and transactions.

Staff generally intervene when there are exceptions, such as when a client makes a complaint by chat or has the patience to sit for hours on the phone waiting for an actual human to respond.

The activities of these bots already fall under normal risk assessment, capture, and management processes.

A Step Further

But when AI chatbots are introduced, those same bankers will have to take it one step further. They will be responsible for reviewing long and confused message trails, particularly for cases that lead to regulatory complaints or breaches. 

Human judgment, and a sense of responsibility, will become increasingly important as there is going to be no way that any regulator will let any bank or banker say, at least for the foreseeable future, that: «the chatbot did it». 

In short, business, banking, and big tech have found their next big thing, at least for now. And it is already making that whole crypto and NFT thing look old.