Baidu Inc (百度) is planning to roll out an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot service similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a person familiar with the matter said, in what could potentially be China’s most prominent entry in a race touched off by the tech phenomenon.
China’s largest search engine company plans to debut a ChatGPT-style application in March, initially embedding it into its main search services, said the person, asking to remain unidentified discussing private information.
The tool, whose name has not been decided, would allow users to obtain conversation-style search results much like OpenAI’s popular platform.
Photo: AFP
Baidu has spent billions of dollars researching AI in a years-long effort to transition from online marketing to deeper technology. Its Ernie system — a large-scale machine-learning model that has been trained on data over several years — is to be the foundation of its upcoming ChatGPT-like tool, the person said.
A Baidu representative declined to comment.
ChatGPT, OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool, has lit up the Internet since its public debut in November last year, amassing more than 1 million users within days and touching off a debate about the role of AI in schools, offices and homes.
Companies including Microsoft Corp are investing billions to try and develop real-world applications, while others are capitalizing on the hype to raise funds. Buzzfeed Inc’s shares more than doubled this month after it announced plans to incorporate ChatGPT in its content.
Baidu has been trying to revive growth in the mobile era, after increasingly lagging its larger rivals in arenas such as mobile advertising, video and social media. Apart from research in AI, the search giant is also developing autonomous driving technology.
Baidu CEO Robin Li (李彥宏) raised ChatGPT as an example of where the tech giant can take the lead during an internal talk last month, a transcript viewed by Bloomberg News showed.
“I’m so glad that the technology we are pondering every day can attract so many people’s attention. That’s not easy,” he said.
Commercializing generative AI by making it a “product that everyone needs” could be challenging, he said.
ChatGPT also piqued the interest of Chinese Internet users, who like people elsewhere shared screenshots of surprising conversations with the AI bot on local social media.
That is despite a heavily censored domestic Internet largely walled off from the rest of the world, a model that has helped companies like Baidu thrive as local equivalents to Alphabet Inc’s Google, Amazon.com Inc and Meta Platforms Inc’s Facebook.
Several Chinese start-ups are also exploring generative AI, and have attracted investors such as Sequoia Capital and Sinovation Ventures (創新工廠).
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