The recent call by leading tech gurus for a pause in the development and use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies more advanced than Microsoft-backed OpenAI's newly released GPT-4 language model, will not have an adverse impact on China's AI progress, said Zhou Hongyi, founder and chairman of cybersecurity firm 360 Security Technology on Thursday.

"I don't think this [a moratorium on GPT development] will hinder China from developing its own large language models," said serial entrepreneur Zhou, in a post published by his official account on Weibo. "We [in China] are in all honesty two years away from where GPT-4 currently is."

Zhou's reference to the AI tech gap comes after Tesla's Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and published historian Yuval Noah Harari, added their names to hundreds of signatories of a letter drafted by the Future of Life Institute, an organisation that researches technological risks to humanity, which called for a suspension in development of AI technologies higher than GPT-4 for at least six months.

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Not everyone is in favour of an AI halt though. Andrew Ng, one of the world's most high-profile machine learning and AI experts, has defended developing more advanced technologies.

Ng called the six month moratorium "a terrible idea" because it is unrealistic unless governments step in, according to a Twitter post by the star scientist on Tuesday. He added that "having governments pause emerging technologies they don't understand ... sets a terrible precedent and is an awful policy for innovation."

360's Zhou said in his Weibo post that given the "exponential leap in AI tech ... I predict that the GPT-6 to GPT-8 iterations will develop consciousness, and even evolve into a new species."

"How should we humans deal with security challenges brought upon us by AI, no one has a definitive answer," said Zhou.

Yet Zhou does not think halting the technology is the solution, saying that "I'm in the security business, and what I believe is that not developing is the biggest threat."

Zhou's 360 is among a group of Chinese companies that have recently launched rival services to ChatGPT.

At a security-themed forum organised by the company on Wednesday, Zhou demonstrated his company's ChatGPT-like services. Although Zhou acknowledged some weak areas, Chinese netizens lauded 360 for carrying out a live demo, compared with Baidu's pre-recorded video to debut Ernie Bot.