Hong Kong government to adopt city’s own ChatGPT-style tool after OpenAI further blocks access Hong Kong government departments will use a locally developed ChatGPT-style tool, the innovation chief has said, days after OpenAI further blocked access to its model for the city and mainland China. Secretary for Innovation, Technology and Industry Sun Dong said on Saturday the artificial intelligence (AI) programme was mainly developed for official clerical use, but authorities would eventually make it available to the public. Sun said the programme was the “Hong Kong version of ChatGPT”, a powerful generative AI model that can understand sophisticated prompts and generate humanlike responses. The city’s new tool, named the “document editing co-pilot application for civil servants”, was developed by the Hong Kong Generative AI Research and Development Centre (HKGAI) under the government’s InnoHK innovation programme. The centre was established in October last year by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in collaboration with four other tertiary educational institutions to carry out research and development on generative AI technology. “We will eventually open the use of the system to the whole society of Hong Kong,” Sun told a radio programme. He said the system would be refined based on feedback from its users.  “The system will only function well by extensive training and usage, and our trial of the system has been smooth,” Sun added. A spokesman for the government’s chief information officer said the auxiliary writing function of the new system could help to draft, translate and summarise documents, and improve the efficiency of public service staff. He added the system was developed using HKGAI’s own generative artificial intelligence technology and its database and large language model were also independently established by the centre. Sun said work on the home-grown system started after the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI. OpenAI announced last month that it would start blocking connections to its application programming interfaces from regions that it did not support, which started on July 9 in the US. Unsupported regions include those that are sanctioned by the US – such as Iran, North Korea and Russia – along with mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau. Sun explained it was better for the government to develop such a system and open it up to other users because of the huge investment required. “Given Hong Kong’s current situation, it will be very hard for the city to have big companies such as Microsoft or Google to subsidise such projects, so let’s have the Hong Kong government do this job,” he said. OpenAI’s parent is a non-profit organisation, but Microsoft has invested US$13 billion in a for-profit subsidiary, for what would be a 49 per cent stake, Reuters has reported. Sun said last year that the government had no plans to adopt ChatGPT for internal use because of potential information security risks and that OpenAI had not given official approval for the use of its model in the city. Hong Kong and the mainland, in a separate move, launched a pilot scheme last December to enable easier cross-border data transfers in the Greater Bay Area. The unprecedented development was designed to make it easier for companies to comply with the mainland’s rules for exporting data. The first phase will involve the banking, credit reference and healthcare sectors. Sun said about 100 organisations had joined the scheme and the government planned to expand it to cover more sectors in the region. A standard contract will be introduced as part of the scheme to ensure the safe and orderly flow of personal information around the bay area for contractual purposes. The technology chief also responded to calls for more land to be allocated to data centres. He said the government should consider the site’s requirements given that the computing power needed by such centres required large amounts of electricity. Francis Fong Po-kiu, the honorary president of the Hong Kong Information Technology Federation, agreed that the government should develop its own ChatGPT-style system. He predicted it could become more common for individual jurisdictions to develop their own applications. https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/hong-kong-economy/article/3270342/hong-kong-adopt-local-version-chatgpt-tech-chief-says-after-openai-blocks-access?module=Hong%20Kong%20economy&pgtype=section (ICE HONG KONG)

Fonte notizia: South China Morning Post