百度首次免费提供旗舰级AI模型

TMTPost -- Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) companies including Baidu, Inc. are taking actions to attract domestic users right after OpenAI was reported to block its ChatGPT access in the country.

Credit：Baidu

Starting July 9, OpenAI will cut off access to its application programming interface (API) in China and other countries and regions that its AI service ChatGPT aren’t officially available, multiple Chinese media outlets including state-owned newspaper Securities Times reported Tuesday. The move will effectively block people from using ChatGPT in China since users and developers there access it via API. Many Chinese startups have been able to access the API platform that allows developers of other products to integrate its AI models and use it to build their own applications.

Some of developers were reported to receive memos from OpenAI to inform that it found they have API traffic from a region that it does not current support, and suggest them to find the supported countries and territories. OpenAI will take additional measures to block API traffic from regions and territories list starting on July 9, according to the reported mail. OpenAI is taking additional steps to block API traffic from regions where it do not support access to its services, Reuters cited an OpenAI spokersperson in a statement later Tuesday.

Baidu then announced it launched an inclusive program, for the first time offering free flagship Ernie AI model for any business users which newly registered from Tuesday to July 25. Under the program, which enables new users to migrate to its Ernie platform for free, Baidu provides additional 50 million Ernie 3.5 flagship model tokens, matching the scale of their OpenAI usage. Besides, Baidu’s major model Ernie Speed/Ernie Lite, and the lightweight model, Ernie Tiny, will continue to be free to use.

Alibaba Cloud said it started offering 22 million free tokens and migration services specially for OpenAI API users through its AI platform. The company's Qwen-plus model is priced at RMB0.004 per 1000 tokens, just one fifth of the charge of GPT-4, according to Alibaba.

Zhipu AI, another major player in China's AI sector, unveiled a Special Migration Program for OpenAI API users, providing 150 million free tokens for migration, including 50 million tokens for developers of GLM-4 and 100 million tokens for GLM-4-Air developers. For customers with high-volume usage, Zhipu offers an amount of free tokens without upper limit that is equivalent to their OpenAI's usage scale, as well as a concurrent scale that is equivalent to OpenAI.

It’s not clear what prompted OpenAI’s move. The company revealed last month that it stopped covert influence operations, including one that originated from China, claiming that they used its AI models to spread disinformation across the internet. Bloomberg noted the cutoff of API coincides with Washington's pressure on American tech companies to limit China’s access to cutting-edge technologies developed in the U.S.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury issued last Friday a proposed rule to implement an executive order signed by U.S. President Joe Biden last August. The executive order was widely deemed as the new effort to prevent technologies and money from the United States flowing to China. It identifies three categories of national security technologies and products to be covered by the program: semiconductors and microelectronics; quantum information technologies; and AI, which are considered critical for the military, intelligence, surveillance, or cyber-enabled capabilities.