Baidu, often referred to as the “Google of China” and having its own search service in the Middle Kingdom, plans to release an AI-based chat bot similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot, which has gained viral popularity in the world. According to a Bloomberg source “familiar with the matter”, the debut of the new development could take place as early as March.
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Initially, Baidu will integrate the bot into its main search services. The tool, as yet unnamed, will allow users to receive responses given in a “conversational” form – in many ways this will be similar to how ChatGPT works. Shares rose 5.8% after the news broke, according to Bloomberg. The Chinese developer has already spent billions of dollars on AI research. At the heart of a ChatGPT-like system will be Ernie, a large-scale machine learning model that has been trained over several years. Baidu itself does not comment on these sources.
The ChatGPT AI tool is known to have gained extraordinary popularity shortly after its public debut in November last year, with more than a million users resorting to its help within days of the premiere. Companies like Microsoft are investing heavily in the solution with an eye to application use, including in their Bing search engine.
Baidu, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd., Tencent Holdings Ltd. and ByteDance Ltd. control most of the Chinese Internet. Baidu is trying to regain its influence in the mobile era after it lost ground to its competitors in areas such as mobile advertising, video content and social media. In addition to AI research, the search giant is also developing autonomous driving technologies.
Back in December, the head of the company, Robin Li, during an internal corporate discussion, called for ChatGPT to be equal to achieve leadership positions in this area. At the same time, he emphasized that commercializing generative AI by turning developments into a product “that everyone needs” can be a difficult task.
Of course, ChatGPT has already attracted the attention of Chinese Internet users, despite some restrictions when using the Web in China, already sharing screenshots of entertaining conversations with foreign-made artificial intelligence. In addition to Baidu, many Chinese startups are also exploring generative AI models – they have already raised funds from well-known investors like Sequoia and Sinovation Ventures.
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