Global chatbot race heats up

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba today said it was working on a rival to ChatGPT, joining a flurry of global tech firms rushing to match the popular AI-powered chatbot.

ChatGPT has sparked a gold rush in artificial intelligence technology, with Microsoft, Google and China's Baidu all working to develop chatbots that can mimic human speech.

The service, created by San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems and programming code on demand within seconds, sparking widespread fears of student cheating or professions becoming obsolete.

Alibaba is now working on a ChatGPT-style conversation bot of its own that is being tested by employees, a company spokeswoman told AFP yesterday.

She declined to offer details on when the service would be launched or whether it would be part of Taobao, China's biggest online shopping platform.

The announcement comes days after Chinese search giant Baidu said it would complete testing of its AI chatbot in March.

Microsoft has announced a multibillion-dollar partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI and plans to integrate the powerful capabilities of language-based artificial intelligence with its Bing search engine.

The maker of the Windows operating system is staking its future on AI through billions of dollars of investment as it directly challenges Alphabet Inc's Google, which for years has outpaced Microsoft in search and browser technology.

Working with the startup OpenAI, Microsoft is aiming to leapfrog its Silicon Valley rival and potentially claim vast returns from tools generally that speed up content creation, automating tasks, if not jobs themselves.

On Monday, Google said it will release a conversational chatbot named Bard, setting up an artificial intelligence showdown with Microsoft. Google also announced a slew of features powered by AI on Wednesday.

But astronomers on Twitter quickly noticed that Google's Bard had given out an error in an ad on Twitter touting its new technology.

In the ad, the bot was asked what to tell a nine-year-old about discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.

It incorrectly offered the response that the telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside Earth's solar system, when that honour actually belongs to the European Very Large Telescope.

The mess-up sent the share price spiraling down by more than seven percent on Wednesday with investors also underwhelmed by the latest announcements.

Before the problem emerged, Google Vice President Prabhakar Raghavan told an event in Paris that Bard was now being used by "trusted testers" but did not give a timeline for a public release, which is expected within weeks.

Analysts have suggested Google rushed its announcement under pressure from Microsoft, but Raghavan denied the claim.

"This has been a multiyear journey," he said, adding that no single event had "dramatically changed the course" of Google's plans.

Google executives announced on Wednesday several AI-induced improvements across products including maps, translation and its image recognition tool Lens.

Media reports said the overnight success of ChatGPT was designated a "code red" threat at Google with founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page -- who left several years ago -- brought back to brainstorm ideas and fast-track a response.

The chatbot race also raised alarms.

With no barriers to creating AI-synthesised text, audio and video, the potential for identity theft, financial fraud and tarnish reputations has sparked global alarm.

Beijing has warned that deepfakes -- which use technology similar to chatbots to create chillingly accurate digital doppelgangers -- present a "danger to national security and social stability".