This is stated in the letter received by the Ministry of Digitization from OpenAI.
“Because of the sanctions, they should block the “LDNR”/Crimea. They don’t know how to distinguish them from customers from the rest of Ukraine,” said Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation Oleksandr Bornyakov in a comment to the Ukrainian publication Forbes.
ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence laboratory launched a few years ago with the financial support of Elon Musk and other entrepreneurs. The bot works on the basis of a “big language model” — artificial intelligence software that has been trained to predict the next word in a sentence by analyzing huge volumes of Internet text and finding patterns through trial and error.
Since its launch, the free version of the chatbot has been very popular — it had more than 1 million users in its first week. However, access to it is limited in some countries — in particular, in Russia, Belarus, Iran, Afghanistan and… Ukraine.
The Ministry of Digitization sent an appeal to OpenAI, but has not yet shared a copy of the response with journalists. So far, persistent Ukrainians have started looking for workarounds to use AI technologies (VPN, registration through an American/European number or access through the services of third-party publishers).
According to insiders, Microsoft is seriously interested in OpenAI AI technologies and is in talks to invest $10 billion in the startup. The funding, joined by other venture capital firms, will value OpenAI at $29 billion. Microsoft previously announced that it would integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and make the chatbot publicly available on its Azure cloud service.