Following San Francisco-based OpenAI announcing plans to suspend services to Chinese developers, AI developers are turning to domestic alternatives. Industry observers warned that the U.S. government engaging in strategic competition with China is escalating the “de-coupling” situation and hindering cooperation between companies in both countries. Starting from July 9, OpenAI will be taking additional measures to block API traffic from regions that are not on its supported countries and territories list. A total of 188 countries and regions currently have access to the API service, but the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong are to be excluded. Through the Application Programming Interface (API) third-party developers can integrate capabilities developed by OpenAI into their applications and build their own AI software.
The U.S. firm's action came after the U.S. Department of the Treasury issued draft rules on June 22 for banning or requiring notification of certain investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology sectors in China under the banner of safeguarding U.S. national security. The draft is believed to be part of the Biden Administration's push to prevent the U.S. from assisting China to develop sophisticated cutting-edge technology and hamper China's development.
Recently, the U.S. has continuously used the “national security threat” rhetoric to stoke fears over Chinese products, in a bid to hinder China's industrial upgrading, reflecting the U.S. mindset of hegemony, Liu Wei, Director of the human-machine interaction and cognitive engineering laboratory with the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, told the Global Times. Liu warned that when the U.S. is restricting China's high-tech sector, it is hurting its own interests.
Following OpenAI restricting Chinese access to its products, some 10 domestic large model companies have announced they would offer alternatives. Alibaba Cloud has announced plans to provide OpenAI API users with a more cost-effective solution using Chinese large models. Chinese developers will be offered 22 million free tokens. Start-up Zhifu AI announced that it will offer developers 150 million tokens and training to help them switch from OpenAI to its ChatGLM language model.
Moonshot AI emphasized in a statement that its Kimi large language model (LLM) offers API services fully compatible with OpenAI. Industry observers generally believed the suspension of service from OpenAI will promote the market share of domestic large model companies in the short term, and their prices are more competitive compared with OpenAI. Zhou Hongyi, Founder and Chairman of 360 Security Technology, believes the suspension of services from OpenAI will speed up the development of China's own LLMs. There are narrowing gaps between the two and the trend of using domestic products as a replacement will be more secure, Zhou said. China's Commerce Ministry already hit back at the U.S.' plans to curb new U.S. investment in critical Chinese tech industries, saying China firmly opposes the U.S.' coercive move and reserves the right to take counter measures, the Global Times reports.
