Who built a wall for Hong Kong in the age of Artificial Intelligence?
link: https://theinitium.com/article...
The article was originally published in Chinese. This machine-translated English version only covers the beginning paragraphs and is for reference only.
———————————————————————————————————————————————————————
In March 2023, the scientific journal Nature published a letter from a reader protesting OpenAI's exclusion of users from some countries from its service without any explanation.
In November 2022, four months ago, the AI company officially released ChatGPT, a generative chat-robot conversation program that kicked off an AI race between tech companies that has yet to end. The impact rippled around the world, but intentionally bypassed a small number of regions-China, Russia, Ukraine, and Saudi Arabia, to name just a few of the countries where OpenAI wasn't available at the time.
Of those, China and Russia are still excluded. This is not surprising. After the Russian-Ukrainian war, many tech companies decided to pull out of Russia, while China began building the "Great Firewall" to gradually isolate itself from the international internet and become an independently run system.
But there's an even more unique situation behind this letter - Hong Kong users can't use OpenAI's services either.
It's a situation that's becoming increasingly common: even if it's not blocked by firewalls, Hong Kong's network isn't as freely connected as it used to be. Some tech companies have taken the initiative to block services here. Following OpenAI, in 2023 when Google's generative conversational robot Bard went online, Google did not include Hong Kong in the available regions either. The letter to Nature was sent out by Simon H. Wang, a Hong Kong-based Internet user. There is growing evidences that an invisible isolation is taking place.
...
