Although OpenAI is taking steps to restrict Chinese users from accessing its platform, a new report claims that Chinese users can still access the company's products through Microsoft's Azure cloud computing platform. Microsoft and OpenAI have a close partnership, with the former gaining exclusive product access to expand enterprise computing through artificial intelligence capabilities. The latest report comes from The Information, which says it has communicated with multiple Chinese customers who could use OpenAI’s conversational artificial intelligence model.
OpenAI announced at the end of last month that it would restrict Chinese customers from using its API starting from July 9. Unlike ChatGPT, which is a final product provided by OpenAI and its partners, the company's API allows customers to develop their own products using OpenAI's technology. Essentially, it provides customers with the ability to layer additional software on top of OpenAI's programs to create products for specific use cases that ChatGPT cannot meet.
The free portion of The Information's report notes that while OpenAI restricts Chinese users from using its API, Microsoft's Chinese customers can still access "OpenAI's conversational artificial intelligence models." The report also added that these models are available to enterprise customers using the Azure cloud computing platform in China and are part of the Azure OpenAI service. According to the publication, it has confirmed with three Chinese companies that "they have access to OpenAI's models."
Microsoft's Azure OpenAI enables users to consolidate their data and run custom queries using artificial intelligence languages and image models. In addition to OpenAI, Azure also provides products from Facebook parent company Meta as part of its artificial intelligence product portfolio, providing users with a diverse, ready-to-customize artificial intelligence platform.
After OpenAI issued a statement last month, Microsoft confirmed that it will continue to provide Azure OpenAI services to Hong Kong users. OpenAI remains unsupported in the Chinese territory and in mainland China; on the surface, Microsoft has adopted a similar policy in the mainland as it does with its Hong Kong operations. To provide its services on Azure, OpenAI pays Microsoft a fee and pays the software giant a commission on its API revenue. The report also pointed out that Microsoft is entitled to a majority of OpenAI’s profits before OpenAI repays investors’ billions of dollars in investment.
The restrictions and bans are not unilateral, as OpenAI's popular chatbot service ChatGPT is also banned in China, where the Chinese government imposes strict controls on public access to information. As part of the government's efforts to control content it deems propaganda, residents of China are unable to access ChatGPT without a workaround. At the same time, the government also approved more than a hundred local large-scale language models to develop the local artificial intelligence industry.
However, training these models will be difficult for Chinese companies given the broad U.S. chip restrictions that also target AI chips. Models like ChatGPT require tens of thousands of the latest GPUs to provide processing power, and a large part of Nvidia's $3.15 trillion market capitalization depends on the fact that its products lead the industry in artificial intelligence performance.