ChatGPT-like chatbot by Fudan team triggers frenzy

A ChatGPT-like chatbot MOSS, released by a team from Shanghai's Fudan University as the first large language model for dialogue in China, has attracted an overwhelming response from users applying for the beta test.

The website (https://moss.fastnlp.top/) was jammed with enthusiastic users shortly after MOSS's beta test came online.

"We sincerely apologize for the bad first impression," a notice from the website said. "Our computational resources fail to support such a large number of visits."

MOSS performs tasks in a conversational way, including answering follow-up questions, programming, and fact answering.

It gave fluent, logical and correct answers to the Shanghai Observer on the future of artificial intelligence. But illogical responses and factual errors were seen in some cases, especially in the Chinese dialogues.

MOSS showed its biggest shortcoming in Chinese language capabilities, resulting from the huge amount of interfering information (e.g. advertisements) on the Chinese Internet, reducing the chatbot's learning efficiency.

"MOSS's English answers are better than Chinese ones because its model base has learned more than 300 billion English words, and only about 30 billion Chinese words," Professor Qiu Xipeng's team from Fudan's Natural Language Processing Laboratory said.

The team said they are stepping up efforts to cleanse the language samples in the Chinese corpus, and the cleaned corpus will be used for the next stage of training.

Qiu added that Although MOSS still has a long way to go, its emergence proves that Chinese scientific research teams have the ability to overcome big technical challenges on the way to developing ChatGPT-like robots.

The team said they plan to share the results of their work through open source.

MOSS pioneers as a generative language model that understands human intentions and has dialogues, providing experience for both Chinese academia and industry, the Shanghai Observer reported.

The chatbot takes its name from the popular science fiction movie "The Wandering Earth II," in which MOSS is the latest quantum supercomputer with unparalleled computing power and sentience, masterminding global projects as well as crises.

Some said the name serves as a click bait bidding to get public attention as the blockbuster movie has triggered heated conversations and got over 3.7 billion yuan (US$547 million) at the box office.