On Feb. 6, Teraku, a luxury e-commerce platform mired in rumors of collapse, announced that it would combine ChatGPT with its luxury business. Us stocks jumped 120% before trading; in the A-share market, the ChatGPT index rose 30.18% last week, according to Wind data. Hanwang Technology, which has a pre-loss of 140 million in 2022, has ushered in its sixth limit after the Spring Festival.
Since the birth of ChatGPT, the number of users has exceeded 100 million in just two months, making it popular again. Microsoft Corp, Alphabet Inc-CL C, Meta and other global technology giants accelerate their layout, causing hot discussion in the domestic capital market and practitioners.
According to Shenzhen net, many practitioners related to AI and NFT are planning to start a business on the AIGC (generative AI) track, and now they have begun to seek funds in the primary market. A number of primary market investment managers told Shenwang that ChatGPT is currently being studied within the organization, and attention to the AIGC track has increased significantly. "We are already investing in the AIGC track," a founding partner of a hard-tech investment firm told Deep net.
2022 is called the first year of AIGC. With the east wind of ChatGPT, AIGC is once again put in the spotlight by capital. Sequoia Capital predicts that generative AI tools such as ChatGPT will allow machines to dabble in knowledge and creative work on a large scale and are expected to generate trillions of dollars of economic value in the future.
Bill Gates previously commented on ChatGPT that the emergence of this artificial intelligence technology is as historic as the birth of the Internet and personal computers.
"ChatGPT is so popular at the moment that it has been blessed by a large number of technology leaders and seems to have become a belief that cannot be falsified." An entrepreneur in the field of AI lamented the "deep web".
Programmers use ChatGPT to "kill" programmers-the impact of ChatGPT on IT, education, finance, creation and many other professional fields is being widely discussed, but this fanaticism in the capital markets and academia is gradually deviating from rationality.
With the proliferation of users and charging expectations approaching, it has become more and more difficult for ordinary users to log in to ChatGPT. In fact, ChatGPT still has a long way to go, whether it is the cost problem and the prospect of commercialization, the effectiveness and true value of the generated content, or its own learning and growth mechanism.
An AI entrepreneur told Deep net that he was still wary of the tuyere after starting a business for so many years. "ChatGPT is creating a bubble as fast as it is hot."
Lost Microsoft Corp regained his glory, Alphabet Inc-CL C responded hastily.
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman (Sam Altman) announced the launch of the chat robot model ChatGPT on Twitter. UBS reports that the number of users of ChatGPT is growing so fast that social media apps can only be realized in dreams. UBS said it took nine months for TikTok to reach 100m monthly active users, while it took Instagram two and a half years to reach that figure.
Recently, after Microsoft Corp announced a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, Alphabet Inc-CL C quickly invested in OpenAI competitor Anthropic, an artificial intelligence start-up. Alphabet Inc-CL C's cloud computing division Google Cloud announced a new partnership with Anthropic on Feb. 4.
For the partnership, Alphabet Inc-CL C reportedly invested about $300m-$400m in Anthropic and acquired a 10 per cent stake in the company, which will increase Anthropic's post-investment valuation to nearly $5 billion. Anthropic was asked to buy cloud computing resources from Alphabet Inc-CL C.
Anthropic was founded in 2021, and its co-founder Dario Amodei was once vice president of research at OpenAI. The company is committed to the research and development of large-scale generation models and general voice assistants, and has successfully developed an intelligent chat robot called Claude, which is comparable to ChatGPT, but it has not yet been released publicly and is still in the closed testing stage.
According to people familiar with the matter, unlike Microsoft Corp integrating OpenAI's technology into many of his services, Alphabet Inc-CL C only regards Anthropic as a technology supplier for the AI competition.
Alphabet Inc-CL C CEO Sandal Pichai said in an earnings call on Feb. 2 that Alphabet Inc-CL C will soon add advanced artificial intelligence to his search engine. He said large language models would be released "in the coming weeks and months".
To cope with the competition from ChatGPT, Alphabet Inc-CL C is testing Apprentice Bard, a chat robot similar to ChatGPT, which is based on Alphabet Inc-CL C's conversation model LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). It can ask questions and get detailed answers similar to ChatGPT.
In fact, Alphabet Inc-CL C has been under pressure since the launch of ChatGPT, and Sandal Pichai has attended several meetings around Alphabet Inc-CL C's artificial intelligence strategy to discuss how to deal with the threat posed by ChatGPT to the company's search engine.
Alphabet Inc-CL C's old rival Microsoft Corp, who was out of date in the era of search and mobile Internet, is now hoping to regain his former glory with ChatGPT.
Microsoft Corp invested 1 billion US dollars in OpenAI in October 2019, and Microsoft Corp and OpenAI have been deeply bound. ChatGPT joined Microsoft Corp's Teams product last week and can write emails for people on Outlook.
Microsoft Corp CEO Satya Nadella (Satya Nadella) said in an interview with the media during the 2023 World Economic Forum that the company plans to integrate OpenAI's artificial intelligence tools, such as ChatGPT, into all its products and provide them as a platform for other enterprises to use.
Satya Nadella said that Microsoft Corp will quickly promote the commercialization of OpenAI tools, and every Microsoft Corp product in the future will contain some AI functions. In addition, Microsoft Corp will also integrate it into the Bing search engine system, and integrate ChatGPT into the Office office suite family bucket, such as Word, PowerPoint and so on.
"the ChatGPT version of the public experience is just a technical preview Demo (demonstration). What is really likely to subvert is that Microsoft Corp integrates it into products such as Office and Bing." A senior practitioner in the field of AI told Deep Web.
Just over the weekend, Microsoft Corp Bing quietly on the new, integrated ChatGPT of the new version of Bing has been online briefly. Whether Bing can make a comeback with ChatGPT in the search field remains to be seen.
As early as three months before the release of ChatGPT, Meta, the parent company of Facebook Inc, had already released its chat robot Blenderbot. But Yann LeCun, chief scientist of Meta and winner of the Turing Award, said that unlike ChatGPT, which had more than 1m users within five days of launch, Meta's Blenderbot was boring.
Tim Cook (TimCook), CEO of Apple Inc, also said on the earnings call on February 3 that AI is the focus of Apple Inc's layout.
The popularity of ChatGPT has recently made domestic Baidu, Inc. the focus of attention. It is reported that Baidu, Inc. will launch an artificial intelligence chat robot service similar to ChatGPT in March, the initial version of which will be embedded in Baidu, Inc. 's search service, allowing users to obtain conversational search results.
Baidu, Inc. confirmed today that the name of the project is Wen Xin Yi Yan and its English name is ERNIE Bot. It will be open to the public after the completion of internal tests in March. Baidu, Inc. 's Hong Kong shares rose 15 per cent after the opening of trading on the news.
ChatGPT brought fire to the AIGC track.
At the beginning of 2023, the primary market has been slowly heating up, the explosion of ChatGPT, not only brought fire to the AIGC track, but also made the AI circuit full of vitality again.
Over the past year, the global primary market has experienced a cold winter. There were few AIGC track financing events in the first half of 2022: in January, Super Parameter Technology announced the completion of round B financing of US $100m, led by Sequoia Capital China, followed by veteran shareholders Wuyuan Capital and Banyan Capital; at the same time, IDEAL IDOL completed seed round financing; in February, Lanzhou Technology completed nearly 100 million yuan of Pre-A round financing.
In the second half of the year, the domestic AIGC track became obviously lively. In July, Digital Force Field completed tens of millions of angel round financing; in September, Zhipu AI announced hundreds of millions of yuan B round financing; in October, Huinight Technology completed 10 million yuan Pre-A+ round financing, TIAMAT completed millions of dollars in angel round financing and Standard Bay Technology completed tens of millions of dollars in round B financing; in November, Xiaobing announced the completion of 1 billion yuan in new financing and tens of millions of strategic financing with companion data. In December, Linxin Intelligence completed tens of millions of yuan of angel + round financing, and FancyTech received round A financing.
Sequoia Capital, Hillhouse Capital, Lenovo Venture Capital, Shun Wei Capital, QiMing Venture Partners and Lianxing Capital and other investment institutions have a layout in the field of AIGC. The phenomenon of track-style investment by investment institutions has been rare, and 2022 is also known as the first year of AIGC.
According to CB Insights, a research firm, there were 110 venture capital deals related to the AIGC concept in 2022, with more than $2.6 billion invested.
According to CB Insights, there are currently about 250 startups in ChatGPT concept, 51% of which are in round An or Angel round. In 2022, ChatGPT and generative AI (AIGC) attracted more than $2.6 billion, giving birth to six unicorns, with the highest valuation being the $29 billion OpenAI.
On October 19th last year, Jasper.ai, a company that specializes in text generation, announced that it had completed a $125 million round of financing, valuing it at $1.5 billion. StabilityAI announced on Oct. 18 that it would continue to develop AI generation models to generate pictures, language, audio, video and 3D, with a post-investment valuation of $1 billion.
There is no doubt that investors are optimistic about the business prospects of ChatGPT and AIGC. Sequoia Capital predicts that the future is expected to generate trillions of dollars in economic value.
The concept of ChatGPT is not only sought after by investment institutions in the primary market, but also popular in the global secondary market and AIGC field.
BuzzFeed (BZFD) has announced that it will use OpenAI software to make test questions and personalized content, and its share price has more than doubled in the past week; C3.ai (AI), an enterprise software company that develops analytical software tools for large enterprises, has risen about 87 per cent in the past month. C3.ai announced plans to launch a new natural language search service for enterprise software applications, including ChatGPT.
As of February 3, the wind artificial intelligence index has risen by more than 20% since the end of last year, and by more than 8% in a single day on February 1. Sun Jiaxu, manager of the Cathay Pacific Taurus Innovation and growth Fund, said, "AI is likely to become a new round of science and technology mainline, and its strategic position is of great significance. Marginal changes will attract the focus of industry and capital. Like the investment boom caused by AlphaGo before, ChatGPT also satisfies some imagination space in the performance vacuum period."
Related concept stocks, such as Saiwei Intelligence, Haitian AAC, Yuncong Technology, Chuling Information and Hanwang Technology, all rose 60% or 70% last week.
Some major shareholders of enterprises began to reduce their holdings and made a profit. according to statistics, five Dong Jiangao, including Zhong Peiya, du Xuejun, Wu Wei, Sun Mingdong and Shen Jianfei, reduced their holdings in turn, with a total cash amount of nearly 70 million yuan.
Controversy and Bubble
Industry insiders evaluate that ChatGPT to the AI industry is like the birth of iPhone 4 in the mobile Internet. With the advent of a new era, the first person to be subverted was Alphabet Inc-CL C. But will ChatGPT replace search engines? There is still a lot of controversy in the industry.
CITIC research newspaper pointed out that ChatGPT optimizes the matching accuracy between question and answer generation, and the user experience is much better than that of traditional search engines, but the series of shortcomings behind it hinders the possible replacement of traditional search engines in the short term.
"first, it is restricted by the model training method, so it is difficult to update the data in real time; second, the cost of a single search is too high, and the estimated cost of generating a piece of information is about 1.3 cents, which is 3 to 4 times that of the current traditional search engine; third, the content generated by the statistical model is so mixed that it is difficult for users to distinguish between true and false." CITIC research newspaper mentioned.
First, ChatGPT is expensive. It is reported that API call is one of the OpenAI business models, the price of one picture call is 0.016-0.02 US dollars, and the language model call is 1K tokens (about 750 words) 0.0004-0.02 US dollars. As the scale of use becomes larger, these computing costs are likely to soar to millions of dollars.
Some analysts say that every time ChatGPT replies, the investment of OpenAI is 1 cent. In December, Sam Altman responded to Musk's question about cost on Twitter: "each ChatGPT conversation costs about a few cents." According to Fortune magazine, OpenAI's net loss totaled $545 million in 2022.
Li Di, CEO of Xiao Bing, told Deep net: "the current amount of dialogue interaction supported by the Xiao Bing framework has reached 14 human lifetime conversations in one day." If the ChatGPT method is used, the daily cost will be as high as 300 million yuan, and the annual cost will exceed 100 billion yuan. For production, even if the cost is reduced by 10 times, this business model is not established, because this cost has no advantage compared with human beings. "
On February 5th, Fortune Certificate released an article entitled "ChatGPT Measurement: improving external Beauty, increasing Inner self-confidence-Medical Beauty Revolution", which said that in order to test whether ChatGPT can be used for research report writing, ChatGPT was used to write a medical beauty industry research report.
Caitong Securities pointed out that from the results, ChatGPT has a high level in text ideography and title writing, but the report formed by this direct generation + translation mode still has the following problems: obvious errors in punctuation and terminology; secondly, it is impossible to know the source and reliability of citation data; in addition, the meaning of some complex sentences is not clear after translation.
Second, ChatGPT is not a channel for knowledge acquisition at present.
Go out and ask founder Li Zhifei that ChatGPT still faces problems and challenges in terms of technology and business, ethics and regulations.
Li Zhifei said, "for example, ChatGPT itself is not based on the real basic database and knowledge structure, cannot be updated in real time, and does not have certain logical reasoning rules, so it will invent, fabricate or fabricate answers to many questions. At the technical level, ChatGPT still has a lot of room for improvement and optimization. At present, ChatGPT is still just a 'toy'. It is far away from becoming a real 'tool', and we need to further explore the path of commercialization. "
After a large number of tests, we found that although the accuracy of ChatGPT answering questions has improved, if the questions are vague or contain some misinformation, the model is likely to produce completely wrong or even fabricated answers in a 'serious' tone. The mixture of true and false answers will cause serious trouble for users when they need to seek answers to professional questions, which is also a common problem in large language models. " CITIC research newspaper mentioned.
In Li Di's view, "ChatGPT is not in pursuit of providing accurate knowledge, but more like a certain type of behavior pattern optimization system" and is not a serious knowledge system.
Third, ChatGPT has some disadvantages such as cheating and fraud.
The British journal Nature has announced that it will no longer support AI tools as author papers. Guo Yingjian, deputy dean of the Capital Institute of Development and Strategy at Renmin University of China, wrote, "although people were already talking about the arrival of the AI era a few years ago, when ChatGPT hit head-on like a tsunami, academia basically responded hastily." He pointed out that whether to ban ChatGPT has really become a problem that people have to face.
In addition, Yann LeCun, chief scientist of Meta and winner of the Turing Award, says ChatGPT has no particular innovation in terms of underlying technology. The reason why it is regarded as a "revolutionary product" by the public, Yann LeCun believes that it is mainly well designed and well combined at the product level. He believes that ChatGPT's grasp of reality is very superficial.
Recently, Yang Likun said at a small media and high-line gathering, "compared with other laboratories, OpenAI has not made any special progress." Transformer is the invention of Alphabet Inc-CL C, and the work on such language projects can be traced back to decades ago. The "T" (Transformer) in GPT is built by OpenAI on the basis of Alphabet Inc-CL C's Transformer language model framework.
Even so, many institutions are optimistic about the future of ChatGPT and its AIGC track.
"just as mobile devices release new types of applications through new features such as GPS, cameras, and web connectivity, we expect these large models to spark a new wave of AIGC applications. Just like the mobile Internet was opened to the market by some killer apps a decade ago, AIGC killer apps will also appear, and the game begins. " Songya Huang and Pat Grady, two Sequoia American partners, predicted this in an article published last year.
An entrepreneur in the AI field said, "there are too many bubbles about ChatGPT. It is estimated that a bunch of similar products for making ChatGPT will spring up in China in the first half of this year. These people may have made AIGC last year and may have been in currency circles a few years ago."
In the past, 5G, autopilot and meta-universe have all been sought after by capital. Today, the super application of 5G has not yet been born, autopilot is still exploring the L4 (highly autopilot), and the once dazzling halo of meta-universe has been dimmed. Bill Gates said, "ChatGPT gives us a glimpse into the future," but how far is the future?
Edit / lydia