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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 working relationship, with the former gaining exclusive product access to expand enterprise computing through artificial intelligence capabilities. The latest report comes from The Information, which claims that it has communicated with multiple Chinese customers who can use OpenAI's conversational AI models.

OpenAI announced late last month that it would restrict Chinese customers from using its API starting 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 overlay additional software on OpenAI's program to create specific use case products that ChatGPT cannot meet.

The free portion of The Information's report states that while OpenAI restricts Chinese users from using its API, Microsoft's Chinese customers can still access "OpenAI's conversational AI models." The report adds that these models are available to enterprise customers using the Azure cloud computing platform in China as part of the Azure OpenAI service. According to the publication, it has confirmed with three Chinese companies that "they can access OpenAI's models."

Microsoft's Azure OpenAI enables users to integrate their data and run custom queries using AI language and image models. In addition to OpenAI, Azure also offers products from Facebook's parent company Meta as part of its AI portfolio, providing users with a diverse, ready-to-customize AI platform.

Following OpenAI's announcement last month, Microsoft confirmed that it will continue to provide Azure OpenAI services to users in Hong Kong. OpenAI remains unsupported in the Chinese territory and mainland China; ostensibly, Microsoft has adopted a similar policy in the mainland to its Hong Kong operations. OpenAI pays Microsoft fees to provide its services on Azure and pays the software giant a commission from its API revenue. The report also states that Microsoft is entitled to a large portion of OpenAI's profits before OpenAI repays investors for their billions of dollars in investment.

The restrictions and bans are not one-sided, as OpenAI's popular chatbot service ChatGPT is also banned in China, where the Chinese government has tight controls on public access to information. As part of the government's efforts to control what it considers to be propaganda, Chinese residents cannot access ChatGPT without workarounds. At the same time, the government has also approved more than a hundred local large-scale language models to develop the local AI industry.

However, training these models will be difficult for Chinese companies given the United States’ extensive chip restrictions, which 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 value depends on the fact that its products lead the industry in terms of AI performance.

Although Azure is indeed expensive, for Chinese startups, opportunities are hard to come by and we must seize them at all times. LOL