Buzz
Baidu's strategic asset, carrying the hopes, is named Ernie Bot.
As one of China's leading tech giants, Baidu naturally cannot stand aside from the increasingly fierce competition on the battleground named 'Artificial Intelligence Chatbot.' Baidu's strategic asset, carrying the hopes, is named Ernie Bot, and according to plan, this AI tool has just completed its internal testing phase and is officially launching to the public.
Ernie Bot will possess the ability to respond to user queries and engage in natural language conversations, akin to ChatGPT or the recently unveiled Bard chatbot by Google. It will undoubtedly emerge as a direct competitor to these two platforms.
However, Ernie bot didn't just come into existence naturally. Baidu has been working on a fundamental large language model called ERNIE for several years. ERNIE, short for 'Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,' is a substantial language model supported by Baidu's AI, which actually made its debut in 2019. This model will serve as the foundation for Ernie Bot, purportedly possessing the ability to comprehend and generate language, and notably to convert text descriptions into semantically equivalent images.
Baidu's goal is to provide Ernie Bot as a standalone application. Subsequently, in phase two, the company plans to integrate this tool into its search engine. This means users will receive results generated by the chatbot when they conduct search queries on Baidu.
In reality, Baidu itself acknowledges that Ernie may not be perfect yet, but the hot development trend and market demand have led the company to decide to launch the product early to gain a competitive advantage. The unveiling of Ernie Bot took place just a few days after OpenAI introduced GPT-4 upgraded with text-image support, which supports the Bing chatbot.
