Chinese tech giant Alibaba working on a ChatGPT rival; shares jump

The Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba told CNBC on Wednesday that it is working on a rival to ChatGPT, joining a scramble of tech firms to jump on the chatbot hype.

A spokesperson for the company said that the company is working on Chat GPT-style technology and it is currently being tested internally at the firm.

Alibaba shares rose 3 percent in premarket trading in the U.S.

The move comes as tech companies globally look to jump on the excitement generated by ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot created by OpenAI. Users can ask questions on various topics, write articles and even generate code from ChatGPT.

ChatGPT falls under the category of generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can be used to generate text or images.

Alibaba said it has been working on generative AI since 2017. The company did not give a timeline for when it might launch its ChatGPT competitor.

ChatGPT has sparked somewhat of an AI arms race among the world’s biggest tech players. Microsoft invested in OpenAI and this week announced an AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser, which will be powered by ChatGPT technology.

Also this week, Google announced its artificial intelligence chatbot technology called Bard as part of the “Code Red” project to respond to the challenge posed by ChatGPT.

The Chinese search giant Bedouin said this week that it is testing its chatbot, called “Ernie bot” in English or “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese. The announcement sent shares skyrocketing, highlighting investor excitement over the technology.

Alibaba, one of China’s biggest cloud computing players and the country’s largest e-commerce company, has hinted that its own chatbot could be integrated into its products.

An Alibaba spokesperson told CNBC, “As a technology leader, we will continue to invest in transforming cutting-edge innovations into value-added applications through cloud services for our customers as well as their end users. “