(Yicai Global) Feb. 21 -- Fudan University released China’s first ChatGPT-like chatbot platform to the public yesterday, beating Baidu and other Chinese projects to the punch.

Developed by Prof. Qiu Xipeng’s team at the Fudan University Natural Language Processing Group, Moss can perform tasks such as conversation generation, programming, as well as asking and answering questions. The project, which is also supported by the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, is expected to be shared through open source in the future.

To use Moss, testers need an invitation code, which they can obtain after adding their phone number to a waiting list, according to the platform’s website. But many users received the notice “the server is overloaded, please try again tomorrow” when trying to enter the site yesterday.

The server may be slow to respond because of too many visitors after the service was released to the public late yesterday, the person in charge of the development team told Yicai Global.

A number of Chinese internet giants, including Baidu, Alibaba Group Holding, and 360 Security Technology, are rushing to develop large-scale conversational language models similar to ChatGPT. Baidu said on Feb. 7 that it would complete internal testing of its service next month.

ChatGPT’s model has hundreds of billions of parameters, with many staffers needed for data labeling and long training. Microsoft started developing chatbots in 2016, so it will not be easy for Chinese companies to catch up in the short term.

The main gap between Moss and OPenAI’s ChatGPT lies in the scale of the data, a source familiar with Fudan University’s chatbot told Yicai Global. There is still much room for improvement in terms of task completion and knowledge reserves, according to the team behind Moss.

Editors: Shi Yi, Futura Costaglione