Inside the ChatGPT race in China

Most people who've experienced ChatGPT firsthand in China have accessed it through VPNs or paid workarounds--for example, clever entrepreneurs have essentially rented out OpenAI accounts or asked ChatGPT questions on buyers' behalf, at the price of a few bucks per 20 questions. But even more people are seeing the results through screenshots and short social videos showing ChatGPT's answers, both of which have swept Chinese social media this week. Beyond the allure of the new and hard to access, it's likely been so popular because ChatGPT's ability to answer questions in Chinese has exceeded the expectations of many people (including me!). GPT-3--the previous model of this tech from OpenAI, which was released in 2020 and was also unavailable in China--was not very good at working with Chinese content. And while a few Chinese companies developed localized chatbot alternatives to GPT-3, they have often been derided by users as predictable, repetitive, and frustratingly off base.