Chinese businessmen are simultaneously surprised and concerned by OpenAI’s Sora photo-to-video tool, the developer of ChatGPT.
China’s business and technology community expressed both excitement and concern about OpenAI’s latest achievement in generative AI with its Sora text-to-video model, amid competition in the field. potential increases and restrictions from US-China trade tensions.
Sora is OpenAI’s latest text-to-video engine. (Photo: LinkedIn)
Yin Ye, CEO of genomics group BGI Group, said that when OpenAI launches ChatGPT in 2022, Chinese AI companies are confident that they can catch up. “because the focus is only on language and text”. However, Sora proves that “the digital world can actually combine with the laws of physics in the real world”, he said in a video posted over the weekend on WeChat. Yin likens it to “Newtonian moment in development AI”.
Meanwhile, Zhou Hongyi, Chairman and CEO of 360 Security Technology, commented on the Weibo blog that the AI gap between China and the US could widen if OpenAI is researching other “secret weapons”. Zhou estimates China’s best large language models (LLMs) – the technology that powers AI tools like ChatGPT – “close to GPT-3.5, but still 1.5 years away from GPT-4”. OpenAI introduces GPT-4 in March 2023.
Some Chinese businessmen do not want to exaggerate Sora’s abilities.
“With the demo videos provided by Sora, it does not achieve major breakthroughs in understanding the world,” Fang Han, CEO of game developer and publisher Kunlun Tech, said in an interview with Shang Securities News. “The gap between Sora and Chinese-developed text-to-video tools is not as large as in the LLM field,” he added.
Domestic investors seem to have viewed the news of Sora’s appearance as a positive sign for the market. The Sora index – which includes 49 technology, entertainment and media companies listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen – rose 11.4% on February 20, the first trading day after the Lunar New Year holiday.
The market sees opportunities in generative AI development. LLM is a rapidly growing and generative AI field “will provide a strong impetus for the development of computing power in China and the world”, Ping An Securities said in a report published on Monday. The financial giant added that industries including algorithms and cybersecurity will benefit.
However, Ping An warned that there could be “supply chain risks” if the US continues to restrict chip exports to China. Sanctions “can accelerate the maturity of the domestic AI chip industry”, But “‘homegrown’ alternatives may fall short of expectations”the report said.
BGI’s Yin also questioned whether China has enough time to catch up amid supply chain disruptions and market fragmentation. Washington has blocked Chinese companies from accessing the world’s most advanced semiconductor tools by increasing export restrictions on products using technology originating from the US.
In October 2023, the US again tightened its grip, blocking mainland access to graphics processing units (GPUs) that Nvidia had designed specifically for Chinese customers to meet the restrictions. before.
(Theo SCMP)