Zhou Hongyi, founder and CEO of 360 Group, a cybersecurity software powerhouse, said on Weibo yesterday that the initiative led by Elon Musk and other tech leaders to halt the arrival of GPT-5 will not distract China from committing itself to developing its own large language model (LLM).
Zhou’s remarks were in response to the recent petition signed by Musk and more than 1,000 tech moguls and scientists over concerns about the danger OpenAI’s omnipotent ChatGPT poses to mankind.
The Chinese internet tycoon said a few days ago that China’s ChatGPT-like technologies lag GPT-4, the latest version of ChatGPT, by at least two years. Thus, it is premature to worry about the risks, Zhou wrote in the post.
“Instead, the greatest danger would be to stop developing China’s answer to ChatGPT,” he added.
Zhous is more optimistic than many about the benefits of GPT. He said the disruptive conversational AI will lead a new industrial revolution, one with more wide-ranging implications than the Internet and iPhone.
In his opinion, ChatGPT has been deployed in many industries and will bring about massive productivity increases, resulting in an improvement to national strengths.
“China must strive to catch up,” Zhou noted.
During a recent event, he told the audience that when ChatGPT is updated to GPT-6 or GPT-8, it will become a “new species,” and no one is sure about the security challenges AI will then pose to mankind.
Zhou said GPT’s evolution must have caused some ramifications that few had anticipated, so much so that they led Musk and others to sound the alarm.
“GPT-4 is the early form of super-AI, and it has led to phenomena that even its inventors cannot account for, such as emergence, hallucination, capacity shift and augmented logic,” said Zhou. “The process is comparable to ape’s evolution into man, where no one can tell for certain when ape suddenly developed a larger brain.”
Since the birth of GPT-4, which has swept the world and had many seriously worried about job security, the issue of co-existence with AI has been a hot topic that polarized commentators.
Zhou entered the fray, saying that he was more sanguine about ChatGPT’s social impact.
“AI is not here to replace mankind; rather, it is here to enhance us,” he wrote. “Man will experience the largest emancipation of productivity since the Industrial Revolution.”
Looking back on human history, man is at the top of the food chain not because of their physique or intelligence, but thanks to the continuous ability to develop and use tools, according to him.
Zhou likened GPT to the greatest ever tool of this era. Humans can leverage it to considerably lift production efficiency and enhance individual capacity. Even ordinary folks can unlock new professional skills and unleash their potential through GPT.
“Through human-machine interaction, we will become the strongest man of all time, aka Homo sapiens 2.0,” Zhou rhapsodized.
Lured by the commercial prospects, he and a few other Chinese tech entrepreneurs, in particular Baidu’s Robin Li, have jumped on the ChatGPT bandwagon to devise their own versions of the conversational AI tool.
