Welcome to the Cynical Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China produced in partnership with the China Project.

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reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor. I'm Kaiser Guo coming to you from

Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The sudden arrival of generative AI, large language models like

chat GPT or Google's Bard, as well as the proliferation of image, video, and audio AI

certainly feels at least from why I sit like a technological step change

just from a few months ago, really.

As we've talked about on previous shows,

Chinese AI researchers were astonished at what they saw once OpenAI

took the wraps off of chat GPT a few months ago. And when some Chinese companies hurriedly

released their own LLMs, reviewers for the most part agreed that they were not quite ready

for prime time. All this really lit a fire to

China's AI scientists and researchers, whether in tech companies or in research institutes.

The fact that the draft of the initial regulations governing generative AI, something that we

talked about on the show a few months ago, had their most onerous and potentially

cumbersome requirements actually stripped out of them before the actual regulations were introduced.

...