China's Baidu Reveals Plans To Launch ChatGPT-Style 'Ernie Bot'

China's Baidu said on Tuesday it would complete internal testing of a ChatGPT-style project called 'Ernie Bot' in March, joining a global race as interest in generative artificial intelligence (AI) gathers steam. Reuters reports: Ernie, meaning 'Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,' is a large AI-powered language model introduced in 2019, Baidu said. It has gradually grown to be able to perform tasks including language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation, it added. Search engine giant Baidu's Hong Kong-listed shares jumped as much as 13.4% on the news.

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters last week that Baidu was planning to launch such a service in March. The person said Baidu aims to make the service available as a standalone application and gradually merge it into its search engine by incorporating chatbot-generated results when users make search requests. In a blog post on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company is working on a ChatGPT competitor named Bard.

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