China’s slow public AI roll-out points to its tech sector’s new regulatory reality

China has joined the global rush to generative artificial intelligence, boasting close to 80 AI models from firms like Baidu and Alibaba and startups attracting almost $14 billion of funding over the last six months.

But unlike in the West, where OpenAI’s ChatGPT has attracted more than 100 million monthly users whose inputs help it to learn from to constantly refine and improve its product, no Chinese AI chatbots have been made available to the general public.