Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) stocks are the latest rage in mainland markets as the global frenzy around the Microsoft Corp-backed ChatGPT chatbot spurs speculative bets on the revolutionary computing technology.
Just two months after its launch, ChatGPT — which can generate articles, essays, jokes and even poetry in response to prompts — has been rated the fastest-growing consumer app in history. That has pushed Google owner Alphabet Inc to plan its own chatbot service and using more AI for its search engine.
While ChatGPT is not accessible in China, mainland investors are still pumping up the shares of AI technology companies such as Hanwang Technology Co (漢王科技), TRS Information Technology Co (拓爾思信息技術) and Cloudwalk Technology Co (雲從科技).
Photo: Reuters
The CSI AI Industry Index, which includes larger capitalized companies such as iFlytek Co (科大訊飛), is up about 17 percent this year, outperforming the benchmark CSI300 Index’s 6 percent rise.
To be sure, there is no indication that these AI companies are close to pushing out a ChatGPT-like product. The closest seems to be search engine giant Baidu Inc (百度) with plans to complete testing of its “Ernie bot” next month. Its shares surged more than 15 percent yesterday after making the announcement.
Ernie, for “Enhanced Representation Through Knowledge Integration,” is a large AI-powered language model introduced in 2019, Baidu said.
It has gradually grown to be able to perform tasks including understanding language, language generation and text-to-image generation, it added.
A person familiar with the matter last week said that Baidu aims to make the service available as a standalone application and gradually merge it into its search engine by incorporating chatbot-generated results when users make search requests.
Meanwhile, Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai on Monday wrote in a blog post that his company is opening a conversational AI service called Bard to test users for feedback, followed by a public release in the coming weeks, adding that Google plans to add AI features to its search engine that synthesize material for complex queries.
“The industry as a whole tends to first speculate on expectations before only later trading on actual results,” said Zhang Kexing (張可興), general manager of Beijing Gelei Asset Management Center LP (北京格雷資產管理中心).
Shares of Hanwang Technology, which makes products that enable intelligent interactions, rose by their daily limit of 10 percent yesterday, the seventh consecutive session it has reached that limit since markets reopened from the Lunar New Year holiday, boosting prices by more than 60 percent so far this month.
The company said that it expects to report an annual loss for last year, but believes it has an edge over an interface like ChatGPT because its model can produce more precise results for clients.
Cloudwalk shares retreated 5.5 percent yesterday, but have nearly doubled in the seven trading days since the Lunar New Year holiday.
Yesterday, the company told investors that its losses deepened last year, it has not cooperated with OpenAI and has generated no revenues from ChatGPT-related services and products.
Other companies that have disclosed their progress in AI technology include TRS Information Technology and Beijing Haitian Ruisheng Science Technology Ltd (北京海天瑞聲科技). Their share prices have also soared.
The price surge has stretched valuations. TRS for example, trades at nearly 60 times earnings, while Haitian Ruisheng’s price-to-earnings ratio is more than 240.
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