hong kong
CNN
—
Chinese search engine giant Baidu announces that it will launch its own ChatGPT-style service.
It will launch a new artificial intelligence chatbot called “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese, or “Ernie Bot” in English, a spokesperson told CNN 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 how the tool would look or whether it would appear as a feature in its popular search engine.
Baidu’s investments in AI can be seen as “both offensive and defensive strategic move in China”. Daniel Ives, managing director of Wedbush Securities, told CNN. “Chinese Big Tech is fighting in this AI race, with Baidu [being] a key player.
The news follows Google’s announcement on Monday that it would unveil a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” with the apparent aim of rivaling the viral success of ChatGPT.
In a blog post, Google (GOOGL) CEO Sundar Pichai said Bard was open for “trust testers” starting Monday, with plans to make it publicly available “in the coming weeks.” .
Like ChatGPT, which was made public in late November by AI research firm OpenAI, Bard is built on a large language model.
These models are trained on vast troves of online data to generate compelling answers to user prompts.
In the two months since its launch, ChatGPT has been used to generate essays, stories, and song lyrics, and to answer some questions one might have previously Googled.
Microsoft (MSFT) is also investing billions of dollars in OpenAI. Details of the investment are expected to be announced later Tuesday, with the tie-up estimated at around $10 billion, according to Ives.
The deal is “a game-changer in our view 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, making reference to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
– CNN’s Catherine Thorbecke and Juliana Liu contributed to this report.
