"MOSS is at the forefront of the most cutting-edge exploration in the field of natural language processing and even in the field of artificial general intelligence. We look forward to using MOSS as a pedestal that leads to artificial general intelligence, which will become a reality in maybe five to 10 years. By that time, we will accept artificial general intelligence as we accept search engines now."

AGI, also known as strong AI or deep AI, refers to machine intelligence that can solve problems as well as a human.

Qiu and his team of eight Fudan students set out to develop MOSS at the end of last year. Although the scale of MOSS is smaller than that of ChatGPT, the Chinese chatbot has a decent logical ability, said the team.

Sun Tianxiang, a doctoral student from the School of Computer Science and a key member of the research team, remembered that there was one exciting moment from the development of MOSS on Jan 19. He said that he had posed a question in Chinese but MOSS answered in English. This was an exciting development as MOSS's Chinese corpus at that moment accounted for less than 0.1 percent of all training data, Sun explained.