"That was amazing because we had not even taught it machine translation," said Qiu, before pointing out that he was so excited by the development that he even lost sleep that night.

"MOSS right now is like a smart kid," he added. "Even though it is not good at writing poems, solving problems or doing specific things, it has the potential of becoming an AGI framework."

The fact that MOSS is smaller in scale compared with ChatGPT has allowed the public to develop various application scenarios, said the research team. Once made open source as promised by the research team, MOSS can be deployed by small and medium-sized enterprises to develop various vertical products, such as smart customer service, smart home and AI lawyers, Qiu said.