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Artificial intelligence
TechTech Trends

WeChat kicks out ChatGPT apps after third-party services flourished on Tencent platform amid strong interest in China

  • Unofficial mini programs started springing up on WeChat as popularity rose for ChatGPT, which is not officially available in China
  • OpenAI’s API makes it easy to access the service, but Tencent said the content ‘did not fall within the scope’ of WeChat’s service

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OpenAI’s ChatGPT artificial intelligence bot quickly became an international sensation, but it was never made available in China, where third-party mini programs for the service on WeChat grew popular until they were banned this week. Photo: TNS
Iris Dengin Shenzhen
Chinese social media giant Tencent Holdings has removed WeChat mini programs related to the OpenAI’s viral hit artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT, which is not officially available in the country, after local developers rushed to provide unauthorised access to the service.

As of Friday, searches for “ChatGPT” no longer return any mini program results in the search bar of WeChat, China’s largest social network also known as Weixin. One particular mini program now displays a message saying it “has suspended service because the content did not fall within the scope of the platform’s open service”.

Tencent did not provide any further comment.

OpenAI does not provide applications for its services, but its open application programming interface (API) has allowed for an ecosystem of third-party apps tapping into its AI to flourish. The official WeChat accounts of developers providing ChatGPT services remained available to users on Friday.

The San Francisco-based research lab works on language models that produce human-like text and can answer a wide variety of questions from prompts for academic essays and fictional stories to computer code for specific tasks.

An API for OpenAI’s GPT-3 model has been available to the public since 2020, but it was the recent release of the more dialogue-focused ChatGPT that turned the company’s tech into an internet sensation. Six days after its November 30 launch, ChatGPT already had 1 million users.

OpenAI is not available in certain countries, however, China included. A foreign IP address, usually accessible with a virtual private network, and a foreign phone number are needed to sign up. Enough people on Chinese social media appeared to have worked around the limitations to spark heated discussions about the technology.
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