Can ChatGPT, which is popular all over the world, still make Chinese investors pay?

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Author | Hyacinth Edit | My people

When we were still immersed in the afterglow of the Spring Festival, a news from overseas markets detonated the investment circle:

Microsoft announced the third phase of its long-term partnership with OpenAI to accelerate AI breakthroughs through a multi-year, multibillion-dollar investment to ensure these benefits are widely shared with the world. According to a person familiar with the matter, Microsoft intends to inject $10 billion into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

If we say, after the release of ChatGPT by artificial intelligence research laboratory OpenAI on November 30, 2022, the market's reaction is, what is ChatGPT and what is it for? So after this news came out, the market's reaction shifted from curiosity and shock to who are the players in the ChatGPT track, and do Chinese investors still have a chance?

However, the secondary market does not seem to give investors time to think, on January 30, as soon as the market opened after the holiday, AIGC concept stocks collectively strengthened, ChatGPT became the leading sector in the first week after the holiday, Hanwang Technology won five consecutive boards, the stock price soared from 16.74 yuan to 26.96 yuan at the close of February 3, an increase of more than 60%, becoming the most beautiful boy in the capital market at the beginning of the year of the rabbit, in addition to the A-share Yuncong Technology, iFLYTEK, Fushi Holdings, Tars, etc., Hong Kong stocks of SenseTime, Baidu, etc., US stocks of Microsoft , BuzzFeed and others have had eye-popping gains.

ChatGPT this fire not only burns in the secondary market, but also has become a must for giants, the first to sit still is naturally Google, immersed in artificial intelligence for many years Google found that Microsoft stole home, ChatGPT to Google's advertising business basic plate poses a real threat, for this, Google made two preparations, on February 3, Google's parent company Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said that Google will be in "the next few weeks or months" Launch of a large-scale language model based on artificial intelligence similar to ChatGPT. Pichai revealed on the earnings call that users will soon be able to use language models in the form of "search mates." Meanwhile, on February 4, Google has invested nearly $400 million in AI startup Anthropic, which is testing a competitor to OpenAI's popular ChatGPT. Two days in a row of big moves, which shows that Google attaches great importance to this matter.

Baidu, which is similar to Google's business in China, naturally smells the threat, and according to relevant media reports, Baidu will launch an artificial intelligence chatbot similar to ChatGPT in China in March.

What is the sacredness of ChatGPT, which is popular all over the world, what does its birth mean for artificial intelligence, and why can it attract so much attention from all walks of life?

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence technology-driven natural language processing tool that uses the Transformer neural network architecture. It is also GPT-3.5 architecture, which is a model for processing sequence data, with language understanding and text generation capabilities, especially it will train the model by connecting a large number of corpora, which contains real-world dialogue, so that ChatGPT has the ability to know astronomy and geography, and can interact according to the context of the chat, so as to communicate with the chat scene almost no different from real humans. ChatGPT is not only a chatbot, but also can write emails, video scripts, copywriting, translation, code and other tasks.

The author wants to summarize the meaning of ChatGPT in one sentence, ChatGPT makes artificial intelligence truly intelligent.

Compared with the hot heat of the giant and the secondary market, the domestic primary market does not seem to have much response, are there ChatGPT-related entrepreneurial enterprises in China? Are there any other investment opportunities for domestic investors?

01

ChatGPT has a unicorn behind it valued at $29 billion

OpenAI, which released ChatGPT, is an artificial intelligence company headquartered in San Francisco founded in 2015, which was founded by Silicon Valley technology tycoons such as Altman, president of American startup incubator Y Combinator, Musk, president of Tesla, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, and Reed Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn.

Speaking of OpenAI, there is also an interesting soul behind it, and Altman, known as the "father of ChatGPT", is a maverick.

Altman is said to have learned to program and disassemble a Mac when he was 8 years old, however, he said in an interview that owning a Mac computer had an impact on his sexuality, and coming out to his parents at age 16 was difficult for Chinese children to happen.

But his experience as a teenager didn't affect Altman's excellence, and then he studied computer science for two years at Stanford University, the school that is rich in billionaires who dropped out of school, and then he and two classmates dropped out, and yes, Altman also dropped out and dropped out full-time to develop their mobile app, Loopt, which can share a user's location with friends. Loopt is one of the first 8 companies invested by startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC), and a company called Reddit has been invested along with Loopt.

Reddit is a social news site where users (also called redditors) are able to browse and submit links to online content or post their own original or relevant user-submitted text. Other users can vote for the posted link with a high or low score, and the link with the highest score will be placed on the homepage. In addition, users can comment on posted links and reply to other commenters, thus forming an online community. Reddit users can create their own sections on topics, both informal and community submissions to those posting links and comments.

Loopt's founders later sold it for $43 million in 2012, and Altman received $5 million.

After Loopt, Altman created a startup fund called Hydrazine Capital and raised $21 million, including most of the $5 million he received and investment from billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel. Altman invested 75% of his money in YC-backed companies and led Reddit's Series B round.

In 2015, the 29-year-old Altman was named to Forbes' list of 30 Under 30 Venture Capitalists. At the age of 31, he was selected by Paul Graham, who founded YC in 2005, to succeed him as president in 2014.

In 2015, Altman, Musk and several other Silicon Valley bigwigs invested $1 billion in OpenAI, and Altman and Musk's original vision for OpenAI was that it was a nonprofit company whose goal was to ensure that AI would not wipe out humans.

Altman resigned as president of YC in March 2019 to focus on OpenAI, but continued to serve as chairman of YC and became CEO of OpenAI in May. That same year, Altman received a $1 billion investment from Microsoft for OpenAI, and the company began to focus more on developing natural language processing.

In 2021, Microsoft invested in OpenAI again, this time for an undisclosed amount. Recently, it was reported that Microsoft intends to inject another $10 billion into OpenAI. Before Microsoft's investment, other venture capitalists had hoped to buy shares from OpenAI employees through a tender offer, and the company's valuation was as high as $29 billion, equivalent to about 200 billion yuan, making it a well-deserved unicorn.

How can OpenAI become the king of gold and get such a high valuation?

02

ChatGPT fills the "smart" gap in artificial intelligence

On November 30, 2022, about seven years after the company was founded, Altman tweeted: "Today we launched ChatGPT, try to talk to it here", followed by a link where anyone can sign up for an account and start talking to OpenAI's new chatbot for free.

Once launched, ChatGPT quickly spread around the world, with more than 1 million registered users in just 5 days, and according to a report by UBS Group on February 3, just two months after the launch of ChatGPT, its monthly active users have exceeded 100 million at the end of January 2023, becoming the fastest growing consumer app in history. According to Sensor Tower, it took 9 months for TikTok to reach 100 million users, and 21/2 years for Instagram.

Let's take a look at what users are doing with ChatGPT.

Although ChatGPT is called a chatbot model, it is not just to chat with you, foreign users have made positive attempts on the functions of ChatGPT, sharing ChatGPT experience on the Internet has become the most active topic in the community, such as software CEO and engineer Amjad Masad asked it to debug his code, food blogger and Internet celebrity Gina Homolka used it to write a recipe for healthy chocolate chip cookies. Scale AI's engineer Riley Goodside asked it to write the script for the Seinfeld series. Guy Parsons, a marketer who also runs an online gallery dedicated to AI art, had it write prompts for him to enter another AI system, Midjourney, to create images from text descriptions. Roxana Daneshjou, a dermatologist at Stanford University School of Medicine who also studies the application of AI in medicine, asked it medical questions, and many students use it for homework. And that's only within 24 hours of the chatbot's release.

The online course provider Study.com launched a survey of 1,000 students over the age of 18 about their use of ChatGPT in the classroom.

The results showed that more than 9 out of every 10 students knew ChatGPT, far more than elementary school educators, more than 89% of students used ChatGPT for homework, 48% for quizzes, 53% for ChatGPT for essays, and 22% for ChatGPT to generate essay outlines.

Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch recently published a paper on ChatGPT's performance in the final exam of Operations Management, the core Wharton MBA course, concluding that the current version of ChatGPT does a good job of basic operations management and process analysis problems, with serious errors in simple calculations and inability to handle advanced process analysis problems. But ChatGPT understands human thoughts and language and automatically corrects them based on human thoughts, and considering this performance, ChatGPT gets a B to B- score on the test.

As a loyal user of Chat GPT, Dr. Pan Ruofan also said that he used ChatGPT to write papers and described his experience to the author in detail:

To put it simply, after three months of use, my feeling is that it can quickly grasp the concept, help me design the top-level architecture, and then I guide it step by step to fill in the content of the article according to the top-level architecture. For example, let's say there is a research question, let's say the research question can be broken down into 5 parts, and then ask it the details of each part, it can help fill in the content. In the process of use, I think the most important thing is to learn how to ask it questions, and when you ask the right question, it can tell you the answer, so how to ask the question is very important.

Like I want to do an industry research now, I will first ask it to make a problem template, every time I want to study something, I will put the problem template in, so that there will be a basic architecture out. Then fill in the questions involved in each paragraph, and the whole article will be written.

In addition, the other day I received an interview invitation from a large company to do a math test first, I threw all the questions in, and it only took 10 minutes to write all the interview questions. Also, I recently changed my student assignments using Chat GPT.

In the face of such a powerful Chat GPT, overseas students have also begun to ban the use of ChatGPT. In early January, New York City education officials announced a ban on students using ChatGPT in public schools that sparked controversy. Recently, one of France's top universities, Sciences Po, also demanded a ban on the use of all AI-based tools such as ChatGPT, aiming to prevent academic fraud and plagiarism.

The top international journal Nature has introduced two principles for a series of problems such as ChatGPT ghostwriting academic articles and being listed as authors: (1) Any large-scale language model tool (such as ChatGPT) cannot become a paper author; (2) If relevant tools have been used in the creation of the paper, the author should clearly indicate it in the "method" or "acknowledgements" or appropriate part.

In the use of Chat GPT rules are clear, it is obviously difficult for students to get rid of the temptation of Chat GPT, technical loopholes still need to be solved by technology, and magic is defeated.

The Stanford research team has launched a new approach to DetectGPT, aiming to be one of the first tools to combat LLM-generated text in higher education. On February 1, OpenAI officially announced the launch of a new tool, AI Text Classifier, a file detector that helps people detect whether a piece of text was created by a human or written by AI. However, OpenAI also emphasizes that AI-Text-Classifier cannot reliably detect all text written by artificial intelligence, and only exists as a strong reference, such as using this tool to identify academic papers.

Although Chat GPT is popular all over the world, technology is a double-edged sword, Tsinghua University journalism professor Shen Yang said that ChatGPT has exposed the two most serious problems: in terms of function, the wrong information source will output wrong content, ChatGPT may even become a source of rumors, which needs to be improved. Another problem is in use, when AI can replace part of the human brain thinking, the thinking value of the human brain is partially canceled. If education cannot optimize the teaching effect, how can human beings cultivate the new generation? At present, ChatGPT is a bit of a copy of human beings, first learning teenagers to AI brain, which is much greater than the impact of calculators on mathematics teaching, human beings are facing a major and shocking adaptation period.

Recently, an article entitled "ChatGPT assistant writes a record on the 2035 regional modernization strategic planning of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area" was forwarded in the circle of friends, and the comment area also reflected some concerns when lamenting the power of technology, with some comments saying that "civil servants will not be needed in the future", "For projects with data and information level security, you need to use caution and be careful of data leakage".

So with ChatGPT, what is the greatest value of people, and what kind of quality and education do people need to cope with its impact?

Dr. Pan Ruofan said that in the long run, what remains for people is to cultivate the ability to ask questions, and these questions themselves are highly creative, for example, you tell artificial intelligence that you want to fly a car and help me design, this is an imaginative problem, and then AI can complete many parts. But basic scientific research still cannot be replaced, after all, ChatGPT is still integrated in limited data.

Even if there are many problems with the current ChatGPT, it is still revolutionary and subversive, and will completely change the current embarrassing situation of artificial intelligence landing difficulty.

Dr. Pan Ruofan believes that the revolution of ChatGPT is that it tells us a benchmark of what artificial intelligence should look like in the future, when Google came out, we entered the era of keyword from the era of looking up the dictionary, originally you have to know a book first, and then look for information in the book, and then Google tells you that you only need to know the keywords, you can get the relevant information, the search range is very small, to ChatGPT you don't even need to know the keywords, You start describing it in figurative or vague terms, and it tells you what you want.

In the previous Google era, we are active search, the use of keywords, this is based on you have a certain knowledge reserve, you know what the keyword is, ChatGPT is as long as you can ask a good question, it will tell you the answer, this is its most subversive place, our human production logic, knowledge acquisition logic and methodology have all been subverted.

"As a C-end consumer, I think that at present, a lot of software basically does not give people a reason to consume, but if you add ChatGPT but the way, then it will become just needed, which is why some people are willing to pay for these tools." Previous software had a learning cost, but after the advent of AI, the learning cost dropped to 0, and there would be a lot more people willing to pay for it, so in my opinion, all product industries will be disrupted by Chat GPT. Dr. Pan Ruofan said.

At the 2019 StrictlyVC event, Altman was asked how the OpenAI program could be profitable, saying, "Honestly, we don't know. OpenAI, he said, "has never generated any revenue" and "doesn't have any plans to generate revenue at the moment." He said at the time: "We don't know how we will generate revenue in the future. ”

Recently, as more and more users are interested in ChatGPT, it has officially embarked on the road to commercial monetization. OpenAI launched ChatGPT's paid subscription version of ChatGPT Plus, which costs $20 (about 135 yuan) per month.

Where there is money, capital is naturally indispensable, so where is China's ChatGPT and where are the investment opportunities?

03

Look for China's own ChatGPT

What do investors think about ChatGPT?

Investment agency A16z believes that generative AI is a game-changer. Everyone is learning these rules in real time, a lot of value will be unlocked, and the tech world will be very different as a result.

Yutong Zhang, managing partner of GSR Ventures, wrote in "Only Know ChatGPT? GSR Ventures 2023 Technology Investment Outlook: Five Trends, 19 Global Innovative Companies Tour" pointed out that in the context of the explosion of generative AI, the opportunities for start-ups are in two areas: first, large models require a rich plug-in ecosystem, and the ISV plug-in ecology around the basic model is an opportunity for start-ups; Second, small models based on vertical industries can also effectively complement large models in differentiated scenarios. She believes that basic general-purpose large models and scenario-specific small and medium-sized models or plug-ins will bring AI commercialization to the next milestone.

Although AIGC has also set off a boom in the venture capital circle in the past year, but overall, the popularity is much lower than that of foreign countries, do Chinese investors still have the opportunity to invest in their own ChatGPT?

Foreign ChatGPT investment is booming, and it is time for China to get on ChatGPT.

Recently, people familiar with the matter revealed that Google has invested nearly $400 million in artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, which is testing a competitor to OpenAI's popular product ChatGPT.

Dissatisfied with his old employer OpenAI becoming a vassal of Microsoft, Dario Amodei, former vice president of research and development of OpenAI, left with 10 OpenAI employees and founded Anthropic in 2021, the team size is currently about 40 people, most of the members have participated in the development of GPT-2 and GPT-3 models. The company's goal is to build reliable, explainable and manipulable general-purpose AI systems, and most of the 14 research papers published since its inception are related to large-scale generative models and voice assistants.

At present, Anthropic has publicly completed two rounds of financing, A and B, obtaining $124 million and $580 million respectively.

In addition, there are representatives of several different application directions such as Inbenta, Character.ai, and Replika.

Founded in 2011 by former Oracle vice president Jordi Torras, Ibenta started as a consulting company in a variety of industries such as financial services, travel, e-commerce, insurance, automotive and telecommunications. The company specializes in providing four types of products: chatbots, messaging, knowledge bases, and search engines, and conversational AI will provide different consulting assistance in these products, and can customize exclusive models.

Character.ai was founded by Noam Shazeer, a veteran Google employee who worked at Google for more than two decades and served as Google's chief software engineer, and the company was founded in 2021 to make a "chatbot trading platform."

Replika, an AI dating software, completed a round of financing in January 2021, in Replika, each user can create an AI chatbot that is "like themselves enough", whether it is language tone or personality habits, AI can imitate in place.

The author searched in the IT Orange database with "chatbot" as the keyword, and found a total of 112 chatbot startups, and many domestic companies are doing it, for example, Rare World Technology, established in Beijing in 2022, is a virtual social software developer, under which it has developed an AI virtual chat social application Glow, which can help users communicate, interact and establish emotions in real time with the "agent" created based on AI technology. At present, the company has not yet broken the news of financing.

In addition, Altman, as a veteran of the investment circle, has also made a certain layout for its capital operation after his focus shifted to OpenAI. OpenAI invested in at least 16 companies through a $100 million startup fund backed by Microsoft and other investors, which launched in May 2021, according to The Information. Just last month, OpenAI launched its accelerator, Converge, which has invested in 10 companies, both AI tools and AI applications in specific fields, mostly in seed rounds.

It can be seen that ChatGPT's investment abroad is still in its early stages, and AI-related investment opportunities are also widely distributed, and for Chinese investors, 2023 is the time to make a big move.