What is ChatJD?

The E-commerce giant is showing Generative A.I. prowess.

Hey Everyone,

I’m actually impressed with China’s regulation on deepfakes among other things. For A.I. development, the wild-wild west of no regulation is not a good approach. While China is known for heavy censorship, some things should be censored. Chinese authorities have heavy control over internet content, often blocking sites or censoring content that does not sit well with Beijing.

When it comes to copyright, cloning a person’s face or voice without their consent, you bet there should be rules. After two years of intense scrutiny from Chinese regulators on the country’s technology firms, that has seen the introduction of new regulation covering issues such as antitrust and data protection.

Who are JD.com?

So while China is cloning the ChatGPT approaches, ChatJD, of JD.com actually looks fairly interesting. JD.com is a leader in warehouse automation, E-commerce and A.I. in healthcare among other things. They are actually a fairly innovative company and with Alibaba and Pinduoduo are one of the Big Three of China’s E-commerce. They are the one most like Amazon.

Beijing’s Tech Rules

Beijing announced its rules governing “deep synthesis technologies” earlier this year, and finalized them in December. They will come into effect on Jan. 10.

Here are some of the key provisions:

• Users must give consent if their image is to be used in any deep synthesis technology.

• Deep synthesis services cannot use the technology to disseminate fake news.

• Deepfake services need to authenticate the real identity of users.

• Synthetic content must have a notification of some kind to inform users that the image or video has been altered with technology.

• Content that goes against existing laws is prohibited, as is content that endangers national security and interests, damages the national image or disrupts the economy.

The powerful Cyberspace Administration of China is the regulator behind these rules.

According to Arjun Kharpal of CNBC,

• JD.com said it will release an “industrial version” of ChatGPT called ChatJD.

• It will be a chatbot product focused on the fields of retail and finance.

JD.com is already a leader in the industrial Internet of Things and surprising forays into other industries. It’s interesting to me Alibaba and JD.com have already announced generative A.I. products before either Facebook or Amazon in the West.

It’s not as if all of these companies haven’t been doing R&D along these lines for years, it’s not exactly new technology. Transformers were invented in 2017. While LLMs have begun to scale well in the 2020s, we are still far from a maturity point of consumer products around Conversational A.I.

While Alibaba rules the Cloud in China, JD.com is perhaps even more innovative. I have a lot of respect for the company. China can have sizeable companies that compete together instead of the typical monopolies or duopolies you see in the United States, which actually stifles innovation.

ChatJD could help online retailers automatically generate product summaries for their e-commerce websites. The chatbot is reportedly also capable of “helping with financial analysis.” To give ChatJD an edge over rival services, JD.com reportedly plans to draw on its expertise in e-commerce, logistics and financial services.

What is Common Prosperity?

China is more concerned with regulation and antitrust regulation and trying to spread the wealth around.

Since the end of 2020, China has sought to rein in the power of the country’s technology giants and introduced sweeping regulation in areas ranging from antitrust to data protection. But it has also sought to regulate emerging technologies and gone further than any other country in its tech rules.

What is ChatJD?

The product will be able to generate content as well as have human-to-computer dialogue, JD said.

• Dialogue

• Summaries of Products

• Potential applications in Finance and Healthcare