China's A.I. chatbots haven't yet reached the public like ChatGPT did

cnbc.com:

BEIJING — More than two months since the ChatGPT craze hit China, a similar artificial intelligence-based product has yet to reach the country's population at large.

Instead, the most well-known alternatives released by Baidu, Alibaba and others have limited access with waitlists — or restricted trials to business partners.

In what has been compared to an «iPhone moment,» ChatGPT reached an estimated 100 million monthly active users two months after launching in November. The AI-chatbot learns using big data and can generate everything from poems to business strategies in a human-like conversation.

But ChatGPT, created by U.S.-based OpenAI, isn't available in China, where access to Twitter, Facebook and Google is also banned via the government's internet firewall. Beijing this month also released draft rules for regulating AI-generated content, with a public comment period until May 10.

Those restrictions haven't stopped the Chinese press and social media in general from talking frequently about ChatGPT and AI tech. Some people tried to buy overseas ChatGPT accounts on Chinese e-commerce sites.

Domestic companies rushed to release and test alternative products. Accumulating big data and machine learning experience are integral to the tech behind ChatGPT.

So far, publicly available figures indicate similar AI products in China are not as widely available.

Alibaba Cloud said Wednesday it received more than 200,000 requests from businesses to test the company's version of ChatGPT-style tech, called Tongyi Qianwen. The product was announced on April 11.

One of those business partners, Kunlun Tech, launched the «Tiangong» on April 17 which can interact with users in a question-and-answer format. The product is currently