Hong-Kong
DailyExpertNews
—
Chinese search engine giant Baidu says it will launch its own ChatGPT-style service.
It is launching a new artificial intelligence chatbot called “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese, or “Ernie Bot” in English, a spokesperson told DailyExpertNews on Tuesday.
Baidu (BIDU) is currently testing the project internally and will likely roll out the service to users in March, the person said.
The company did not provide further details, such as what the tool would look like or appear as a feature in its popular search engine.
Baidu’s AI investments can be seen as “both an offensive and a defensive strategic move in China”, Daniel Ives, general manager of Wedbush Securities, told DailyExpertNews. “Chinese Big Tech is competing in this AI race, with Baidu [being] a protagonist.”
The news follows Google’s announcement on Monday that it would be unveiling a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent attempt to compete with ChatGPT’s viral success.
In a blog post, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google (GOOGL), said Bard is open to “trusted testers” starting Monday, with plans to make it available to the public “in the coming weeks.”
Like ChatGPT, which was made public in late November by AI research firm OpenAI, Bard is built on a grand language model.
These models are trained on massive amounts of data online to generate compelling responses to user prompts.
In the two months since its launch, ChatGPT has been used to generate essays, stories, lyrics, and answer some questions you might have searched Google before.
Microsoft (MSFT) is also investing billions of dollars in OpenAI. Details of the investment will be announced later Tuesday, with an estimated $10 billion value, according to Ives.
The deal “in our opinion is a game changer for Nadella & Co as the ChatGPT bot is one of the most innovative AI technologies in the world today,” he wrote in a Monday note, referring to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella .
— DailyExpertNews’s Catherine Thorbecke and Juliana Liu contributed to this report.