By WU Yangyu

ChatGPT might have amassed 100 million monthly users, but all that fame comes at a price. Replicas of the chatbot developed by OpenAI are mushrooming across China, including WeChat official account ChatGPT online, ChatGPT Blue and ChatAI App.

Scores of ChatGPT knock-offs began cropping up last week, charging users for sending prompts.

Smooth-talking counterfeiters

At the moment, ChatGPT can't be registered with Chinese phone numbers and replicas are taking their chances in a potentially volcanic market. These replicas' responses do not come from real ChatGPT owned by OpenAI, and copycats are carving up a huge amount of user attention.

In its own description, OpenAI says ChatGPT is an AI-powered chatbot based on the GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) language model. It uses deep learning techniques to generate human-like responses to text input in a conversational manner. It has a remarkable ability to interact in dialogue form and provide responses that appear astonishingly human.

Of all the ChatGPT clones, some are just portals to ChatGPT. Many iPhone users have been conned by one particular app pretending to be ChatGPT. The imposter app managed to rank among the top apps on the App Store in the US. According to MacRumors, the app is still going strong and still attracting users by the dozen.

Talk is not cheap

ChatGPT announced this month that it will pilot a paid subscription for US$20 (150 yuan) a month. Subscribers will get faster responses from the chatbot, even during peak hours. The paid service will roll out first in the United States in the coming weeks and gradually expand to other countries. Meanwhile, OpenAI will continue to provide free access to ChatGPT.

But some knock-offs in China got that move first. ChatGPT Online, provides users with four free conversations, after which they need to pay. The service is not cheap. A total of 20 conversations over three months costs 10 yuan (US$1.50). Another 90 yuan on top of that entitles users to 1,300 conversations over six months. For 1,000 yuan, users get unlimited access for a year.

China wants to develop its own intelligent natural-language systems for a variety of reasons ranging from language and culture to political considerations. Creating an indigenous ChatGPT is a new task for the country’s tech giants.

Starting the conversation

Alibaba’s answer to ChatGPT is undergoing internal testing. WeChat’s parent and video game giant Tencent said it is engaged in “relevant research.”

After debuting a Stable Diffusion-style art generator, Baidu recently announced that it has been working on the Ernie bot, slated to be embedded in Baidu’s search engine next month

Baidu and Alibaba stocks surged briefly on their chatbot announcements. Froth is forming around smaller AI players who are far from able to develop powerful language models.

Chinese audio-to-text service provider iFlytek has seen its share price jump 17 percent this year despite having no ChatGPT-style product in its line.