China is testing a new large language model (LLM) and conversational AI that will, among other things, allow the country’s citizens to ask President Xi Jinping how to be better socialists. The country’s Cyberspace Research Institute recently announced the chatbot is being tested internally.
The state agency organized a team of experts to develop the chatbot, which was trained using the data from its Cyberspace Research Database. But it’s not just a “What would President Xi do” model. The corpus of information used to train the model also includes “seven major Internet information professional knowledge bases.”
The LLM was built using a “registered domestic open source commercial pre-trained language model,” so it’s not OpenAI’s GPT, Google Gemini, or any of the other well-known AI chatbots. Even once it's released from internal testing, the LLM will be deployed via a dedicated server within the China Cyberspace Research Institute.
China’s Cyberspace Research Institute incorporated President Xi’s book, Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era, which is recognized as the president’s definitive political philosophy. Other listed works included in the LLM are the "Network Information General Knowledge Base," "Network Information Dynamic Knowledge Base," "Network Information Journal Knowledge Base," and "Network Information Report Knowledge Base."
China Cyberspace Research Institute says users can choose which knowledge base category to use, and can engage the chatbot in an intelligent question-and-answer session. The AI chatbot can also generate manuscripts, summarize bodies of text, and perform translation between Chinese and English, among other tasks.
The Register pointed out an interview with Dr. Simon Lee, global head of Nvidia’s AI Technology Center that the idea of deliberately incorporating a specific figure's ideas and philosophies isn't new. In that interview, Dr. Lee admitted that Nvidia hopes to one day collaborate with researchers to create generative AI-powered replicas of other important historical figures, such as Roman emperors or even Napoleon.
