Chinese GPT Chat: Baidu to unveil “Ernie Bot”, its generative AI project, in March

technology “Pretrained Generative Transformer” (GPT) is still the north of many companies in 2023. After the announcement of Google Bard in response to Microsoft’s plans to include extended GPT in Bing, the Chinese company Baidu is now enthusiastically implementing this trend in its products. He calls her “Ernie Bot”.

According to a report from ReutersBaidu plans to complete internal testing of “Ernie Bot” in March, demonstrating its commitment to keep pace with the advances of Open AI, Microsoft, and Google.

Following the announcement, the company’s shares rose 15.3% on the Hong Kong stock market, while it posted an interesting 11.2% gain in the US.

China and GPT-3

“Ernie”, an AI based on language models, began its development in 2019, and Baidu was able to add various tools with algorithms that can understand and generate content in language, as well as create images from plain text.

In this case, this “Enhanced Representation Through Knowledge Integration” – or “Ernie” for short – will be offered as a standalone application that will gradually begin to merge with the search engine and other services that require interaction with users through chatbots. .

The need for China’s “own GPT” is a response to the Xi Jinping government’s blockade of Google, ChatGPT and other Western services. This advancement in the implementation of generative AI adds weight to the Asian giant in favor of its forced independence from US services.

Baidu, known to the rest of the world as the “Google of China”, has invested heavily in artificial intelligence systems for cloud support, autonomous driving assistance and other technology services.