Baidu launches Ernie Bot, ChatGPT's rival chatbot

 Baidu's expected strategic card is called Ernie Bot, and as planned, this AI tool has just completed the internal testing phase and officially launched to the public.

Ernie Bot will be able to answer user questions and participate in natural language conversations, similar to ChatGPT or the new Bard chatbot launched by Google a little while ago, and of course will become become a direct competitor of these two platforms.

However, the Ernie bot did not appear out of nowhere. Baidu has been working on a basic large language model called ERNIE for many years. ERNIE stands for "Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration", which is Baidu's big AI-powered language model, which in fact made its debut in 2019. This model will serve as the foundation for Ernie The bot, is said to have possessed the ability to understand and generate language, and especially to convert text descriptions into visual equivalents of meaning.

Baidu's goal is to offer Ernie Bot as a standalone app. Then, in phase two, the company plans to integrate the tool into its search engine. This means that users will receive chatbot-generated results when they perform search queries on Baidu.

News of Baidu's foray into the AI ​​sector has exploded in China's AI-related stock values ​​from Beijing Deep Glint Technology to Cloudwalk Technology in recent days, reflecting growing interest from investors since ChatGPT launched. In addition to Baidu, more and more companies large and small are racing to try to surpass OpenAI.

In fact, Baidu itself also admits that Ernie may not be perfect, but hot development trends and market demand make the company decide to launch products early to take advantage of the competition. The launch of Ernie Bot comes just days after OpenAI introduced an upgraded GPT-4 with text image support, support for Bing chatbots.

Baidu is not the first company to integrate AI into its products and services. Recently, Google introduced Bard, a new conversational chatbot that will incorporate Google's Language Model for Conversational Applications (LaMDA) to provide answers to questions and concerns. Microsoft is also preparing to introduce Bing support for ChatGPT that can answer questions in a conversational way. Tech giant Redmond also brought DALL∙E 2 image creation software to Azure OpenAI, making it easy for users to create images via text input.

Marvin Fry

Update 16 March 2023