China's first competitor to ChatGPT launched publicly yesterday, but within a few hours it had crashed.
As Reuters reports, a team working at the NLP Lab at Fudan University developed the conversational language model known as MOSS. It's described as being able to perform "various natural language tasks including question answering, generating text, summarizing text, generating code, etc." In other words, it's another ChatGPT.
Following the launch yesterday, MOSS went viral on China's social media networks and saw state media refer to it as the first Chinese rival to ChatGPT. The instant popularity proved too much for MOSS to handle, though, and its servers crashed under the load.
The development team apologized, saying, "Our computing resources were not enough to support such large traffic and as an academic group we do not have sufficient engineering experience, creating a very bad experience and first impression on everyone, and we hereby express our heartfelt apologies to everyone."
The MOSS website has been updated to state that it's not really a rival for ChatGPT due to a "lack of high-quality data, computing resources, and the model capacity." Surprisingly for a Chinese project, MOSS performs poorly "on understanding and generating text in languages other than English." The team is actively working to improve the chatbots Chinese language skills. However, it sounds as though computing resources are what the project most desperately needs to succeed.
China is likely to have more success competing with ChatGPT when Ernie Bot launches. The "Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration" chatbot is being developed by Chinese tech company Baidu, which means it should have all the computing resources it needs to both learn and cope with demand once it launches publicly. Meanwhile, Google is attempting to take on ChatGPT with Bard, while Microsoft recently muzzled Bing after it found long conversations can confuse the AI.