China’s Fudan University team apologises as ChatGPT-style platform crashes hours after launch

A staff from China’s Fudan University apologised on Tuesday after a ChatGPT-like chatbot platform they developed crashed hours after it launched to the general public, as a result of a sudden surge of site visitors.

The staff’s announcement on Monday of the platform they referred to as MOSS immediately went viral on Chinese social media, producing tens of tens of millions of hits on China’s Twitter-like Weibo. State media described it as the primary Chinese rival to OpenAI’s hit ChatGPT platform.

But MOSS, which bears the identical title as a superintelligent quantum pc in Chinese sci-fi blockbuster “Wandering Earth 2”, crashed quickly after and by Tuesday the staff mentioned it might not be open to the general public.

The launch of MOSS and the general public response to it underlines the zeal for generative AI and ChatGPT in China and the challenges its home business faces, as a number of of China’s prime universities and tech corporations race to provide a Chinese model of the Microsoft-backed chatbot.

While the Fudan University staff had on Monday initially described MOSS as a conversational language mannequin like ChatGPT, on Tuesday they performed down the comparability, saying that they had a lot to enhance.

“MOSS is still a very immature model, it is still has a long way to go before reaching ChatGPT. An academic research lab like us is unable to produce a model whose ability nears ChatGPT,” a press release printed on its web site mentioned.

“Our computing resources were not enough to support such large traffic and as an academic group we do not have sufficient engineering experience, creating a very bad experience and first impression on everyone, and we hereby express our heartfelt apologies to everyone.” ChatGPT, the fastest-growing client software in historical past, has additionally crashed a number of occasions as a result of heavy site visitors.

While few customers had been in a position to share their experiences of the platform earlier than the crash, a journalist from the Shanghai Observer shared an in depth account of an interplay with MOSS and mentioned that the chatbot’s English was higher than its Chinese.

The staff’s chief, Qiu Xipeng, a professor at Fudan’s School of Computer Science, advised the Shanghai Observer on Monday that the principle hole between MOSS and ChatGPT was that the variety of parameters put into MOSS’ language coaching was an order of magnitude smaller than ChatGPT.

Qiu didn’t instantly reply to a request for additional remark.

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