Since it's not allowed to use ChatGPT in China, there is a huge opportunity to build a local LLM.
Source: my own experience.
What puzzles me most is the second restriction. My credit card is accepted by AWS, Google, and many other services. It is also accepted by many services which use Stripe to process payments.
But OpenAI refuses to take my money.
When a website blocks Chinese users, the website loads but you cannot create an account.
Yes, the firewall does not block everything, otherwise it would be the same as turning off the internet! There are websites that work.
EDIT: I read the comment below about Hong Kong, but I can't reply because I'm typing too fast by HN standards, so I'm writing it here and yolo: "I'm from Italy and I remember when ChatGPT was blocked here after the Garante della Privacy complaint, of course the site wasn't blocked by Italy but OpenAI complies with local obligations, so maybe it could be a reason about the block. API were also not blocked in Italy."
EDIT 2: if the website is not actually blocked (the websites that check if a website is reachable by mainland China lied to me) then I guess they are just complying to local regulations so that the entire website does not get blocked.
Curiously, the OpenAI API endpoints works flawlessly with Hong Kong IP addresses as long as you have a working API key.
as in, if i open chat.openai.com in my browser without a VPN, from behind the firewall, i get an openai error message that says "Unable to load site" with the openai logo on screen
if the firewall blocks something the page just doesn't load at all and the connection times out
The geo check only happened once during login at that time, with a very clear message that it's "not available in your region". Once you are logged in with a proxy you can turn off your proxy/VPN/whatever and use ChatGPT just fine.
A lot of online services don't accept Chinese credit cards, hosting providers for instance, so I don't think that is specific to OpenAI. The reason usually given for this is excessive chargebacks of (in the case of hosting) TOS violations like sending junk mail (followed by a charge-back when this is blocked). It sounds a like collective punishment a little: while I don't doubt that there are a lot of problem users coming from China, with such a large population that doesn't indicate that any majority of users from the region are a problem. I can see the commercial PoV though: if the majority of charge-back issues and related problems come from a particular region and you get very few genuine costumers from there¹ then blocking the area is a net gain despite potentially losing customers.
----
[1] due to preferring local variants (for reasons of just wanting to support local, due to local resources having lower latency, due to your service being blocked by something like the GFW, local services being in their language, any/all the above and more)
I'm located in Hong Kong and using Hong Kong credit cards have never been a problem with online merchants. I don't think Hong Kong credit cards are particularly bad with chargebacks or whatever. OpenAI has explicitly blocked Hong Kong (and China). Hong Kong and China, together with other "US adversaries" like Iran, N. Korea, etc are not on OpenAI's supported countries list.
If you have been paying attention, you'll know that US policy makers are worried that Chinese access to AI technology will pose a security risk to the US. This is just one instance of these AI technology restrictions. Ineffectual of course given the many ways to workaround them, but it is what it is.
There’s no security risk I can see except the fact products like ChatGPT increase productivity of a lot of people in a nation so much. Economic.
Hong Kong generally does not have a Great Firewall, so the only thing preventing Hong Kong users from using ChatGPT is Open AI's policy. They don't allow registration from Hong Kong phone numbers, from Hong Kong credit cards, etc.
I'd say it's been pretty deliberate.
Reason? Presumably in alignment with US government policies of trying to slow down China's development in AI, alongside with the chips bans etc etc.
Of course, the only demographic these restrictions can affect are casuals. Even I know how to cirumvent this; thinking that this could hinder a government agent - who surely have access to all the necessary infrastructure by default - is simply mental.
I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI blocking China is a result of them trying to prevent them from generating synthetic training sets.
they also block a lot of data center IP addresses, so if you're trying to access chatgpt from a VPN running on blacklisted datacenter IP range (a lot of VPN services or common cloud providers that people use to set up their own private VPNs are blacklisted), then it tells you it can't access the site and "If you are using a VPN, try turning it off."
So they just block the phone numbers (which has a country code), and credit cards (which owner/issuer's country info is available).
Not sure why this seems to be such a surprise to everyone here...
I imagine it is good enough for most people.
I do wonder what their backend is. They have the same 3.5/4 version numbering scheme that ChatGPT uses, which could be just marketing (and probably is), but I wonder.
EDIT: fixed my translation