China’s ChatGPT rival Moss crashes just mere hours after its launch, because of a surge in traffic
Fudan University in Shanghai, China, has launched MOSS, a new AI language model platform designed to provide users with a ChatGPT-style experience. However, only hours after its launch, Moss crashed, preventing users from accessing its features. Moss is said to be China’s first ChatGPT Rival or competitor.
The MOSS platform was created to provide a conversational AI experience similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has gained popularity in recent months. It is said to be capable of “various natural language tasks such as question answering, generating text, summarizing text, generating code, and so on.” The goal was to develop a system that could understand and respond to natural language queries. However, users began reporting issues with MOSS shortly after its launch. The system became overloaded as the number of users attempting to access the platform increased, eventually resulting in a complete crash.
MOSS went viral on China’s social media networks after its launch yesterday, with state media referring to it as the first Chinese competitor to ChatGPT. MOSS’s sudden popularity proved too much for it to handle, and its servers crashed under the strain. The development team apologized, saying, “Our computing resources were not enough to support such large traffic and as an academic group we do not have sufficient engineering experience, creating a very bad experience and first impression on everyone, and we hereby express our heartfelt apologies to everyone.” The incident emphasizes the difficulties in developing and launching new AI platforms, especially those that rely heavily on natural language processing. While these systems have the potential to transform the way we interact with technology, they also necessitate a significant amount of data, testing, and refinement before they can be deployed at scale. MOSS’s website has been updated to state that it is not a true competitor to ChatGPT due to a “lack of high-quality data, computing resources, and model capacity.” MOSS performs poorly “on understanding and generating text in languages other than English,” which is surprising for a Chinese project. The team is hard at work improving the chatbot’s Chinese language skills. However, it appears that computing resources are the most critical requirement for the project’s success.