AIGC shares surged in China with ChatGPT and similar applications on the rise
China's artificial intelligence company shares surged on Monday, the first trading day after the Spring Festival, with ChatGPT's booming popularity, and the tech giants' announcement to expand into the so-called AIGC or AI-generated content sector.
ChatGPT, an Elon Musk-supported chatbot, is able to mimic human-like responses with AI-generated content. The new tech has quickly become popular in China.
Baidu Inc plans to launch an AI tool similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT in March, while Microsoft Corp has looked at increasing stakes in OpenAI from its US$1 billion investment now, according to media reports.
They have all helped fuel Chinese AI shares on Monday.
China's AIGC index, provided by data firm Wind, jumped 4.38 percent on Monday, compared with Shanghai's main board growth of 0.14 percent. AI shares iFlytek and Hanvon surged 10 percent daily cap on Monday.
iFlytek, which offers voice recognition and automatic translation services, closed 10 percent higher at 41.67 yuan (US$6.19).
AI innovation and services will be in wider use in the automotive, medical and education industries. Powered by AI techs, iFlytek's net profit will grow more than 30 percent annually since 2023, company chairman Liu Qingfeng said in a recent conference.
AI firm iFlytek jumped 10 percent daily cap on Monday. It expects a high growth of profit in 2023 with AI innovation.
Hanvon, which has e-book and character recognition tech, gained 10 percent daily cap to close at 18.41 yuan. The company now offers RPA (robotic process automation) and OCR (optical character recognition) tech, which can greatly reduce time and cost for duplicated work.
The ChatGPT, supporting English and Chinese, is used for writing news and essays, making business proposals, creating poems in selected topics, and even checking program bugs – it can all be done within seconds.
Based on excellent machine learning algorithms and powerful computing power, through massive data training, AI has really learned to "think." AIGC, including ChatGPC, has great commercial value, according to Guosheng Securities.
But industry officials warned many AI applications are different from ChatGPT, which represents a more advanced and evolved AI. Investors should be cautious about the risk.
HK-listed Baidu closed at 136.1 Hong Kong dollars (US$17.4) on Monday, 0.58 percent lower than the previous trading day. But it was much better than the performance of the other two HK-listed tech giants Alibaba and Tencent, which dropped about 7 percent in the Hong Kong market on Monday.
