Bea Beltran Tech 02.07.2023 23:Feb PM EST

Beijing-Based Internet Giant Baidu Launches Its Own ChatGPT-Like Service

Artificial Intelligence chatbots have been gaining popularity as of late, and it appears that Baidu, one of the biggest AI and internet firms in the world just joined the race. After the search engine released its own chatbot, its shares rose to more than 14% on Tuesday.

ERNIE Bot

The Beijing-based company announced its new AI chatbot called "ERNIE Bot," which stands for "Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration." It also goes by the name "Wenxin Yiyan" in Chinese. It is undergoing internal testing and is set to launch in March this year.

ERNIE already has a foundation to work with since it is based on an already existing language model, Baidu (BIDU), which was developed back in 2019. The company started off with online marketing and slowly transitioned into researching advanced technology like AI.

The company has invested billions in the innovative idea, which was regarded by the managing director of Wedbush Securities Ganiel Ives as "an aggressive and defensive strategic move in China." as mentioned in Interesting Engineering.

Like all the existing AI chatbots, the language models were trained using vast amounts of web data to create responses to inquiries or questions prompted by a user. The language model used by ERNIE has already been trained for many years.

Baidu's AI chatbot has been revised thrice, and this time, the AI is capable of composing essays and poetry, as well as using text prompts to create graphics for its users, which for now, ChatGPT is still not capable of doing.

The search engine giant plan to integrate ERNIE into its primary search service, reports say. Users will be able to get search results in a way that's conversational, like they are asking a human a question, much like it is with OpenAI's ChatGPT.

AI Chatbots are the Future

It seems that AI chatbots will soon be a big part of the Internet. The race was started by OpenAI when they introduced ChatGPT. The amount of popularity it gained showed just how much promise there is for the future of AI.

Investors have seen how Microsoft's investments have paid off, which even from the start has been in the billions. At first, the tech giant invested more than $3 billion in OpenAI, according to The New York Times. In the spirit of continuing the partnership, they invested $10 billion more.

With OpenAI's famous chatbot, Microsoft is planning to integrate ChatGPT with the search engine Bing. The dominating search engine has seen this as a threat, which is why Google is also introducing its own chatbot called "Bard."

They are currently working on the experimental conversational AI service, which will be powered by their own language model called Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA for short. It will be available to the public in the next few weeks, according to Google.

The development of the mentioned chatbots is still in its early days, but if comes close to or exceeds the capabilities of ChatGPT, then search engines will surely show a more advanced response to users compared to what we have now.