Alibaba says it is developing its own ChatGPT AI tool as tech companies vie for a share of the booming generative AI market

ChatGPT continues to dominate headlines and there’s no sign of slowing down as ChatGPT mania spreads globally. Now, tech companies are looking to get a piece of the booming generative AI market, which is estimated to reach $109.37 billion by 2030. Just yesterday, Microsoft announced it was integrating ChatGPT into its Bing search engine in a very serious challenge to Google.

Today, China’s Alibaba Group said it is developing its own ChatGPT-style artificial intelligence (AI) tool and that it was currently in internal testing. The announcement came just a few days after the 21st Century Herald newspaper reported that Jack Ma’s founded e-commerce giant is developing a ChatGPT-like dialogue robot which is currently open to employees for testing, according to a report from Reuters.

When asked about the newspaper report, Alibaba declined to comment on the story. However, Alibaba spokesperson said: “Frontier innovations such as large language models and generative AI have been our focussed areas since the formation of DAMO in 2017.” The spokesperson also added:

“As a technology leader, we will continue to invest in turning cutting-edge innovations into value-added applications for our customers as well as their end-users through cloud services.”

Alibaba now joins a series of tech companies in the global frenzy around the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT chatbot. Late last month, China’s Baidu also announced it plans to launch a competitor to ChatGPT in March as the AI race heats up.

As we reported early this month, Baidu is already using chatbots to help companies “recruit” digital humans to usher in a new era of what’s called Digital Human as a Service (or DHaaS). But now, Baidu is planning to expand its focus and incorporate chatbot-generated results when users make search requests, instead of only links.

OpenAI first released ChatGPT to the public on November 30, 2022. In just two months, ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users in January, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history.

ChatGPT is a dialogue-based AI chat interface for its GPT-3 family of large language models. The mind-blowing ChatGPT is a successor to the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), which is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.

ChatGPT was adapted from the GPT-3.5 model but trained to provide more conversational answers. However, unlike the GPT-3, the new ChatGPT demonstrates an array of new capabilities including the ability to engage in conversations with users, write software codes, tell stories, and provide solutions to complex mathematical equations. The beauty of it all is that you can test out the new chatbot for yourself right here.

ChatGPT could do virtually everything from writing poetry, and correcting coding mistakes with detailed examples, to generating AI art prompts. It can even explain the worst-case time complexity of the bubble sort algorithm.