Buying frenzy at Baidu after the announcement of its own AI chatbot: Ernie Bot

According to a company statement, the project will complete internal testing in March before going public and will be named on “Ernie bot” in English and “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese. Ernie, who wears in development since 2019is an acronym for Improved representation through knowledge integration.i.e. “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration”.

“What sets ERNIE apart from other language models is its the integration of deep insights and big data, resulting in exceptional capabilities to understand and generate. Since then it has evolved into a series of large advanced models, capable of performing a wide range of tasks, such as language understanding, language generation and text-to-image generation.“The Asian company said.

Although the news was well received by the market, it cannot be said that it came as a surprise. Earlier this year, the Chinese company’s chief technology officer, Haifeng Wang, emphasized the importance of deep learning, which is at the heart of AI, and noted that it presented a ” growing potential” lately. “If these content creation capabilities can be fully utilized, many important tasks in film production can be accomplished,” he explained.

Baidu, which has over 600 million active users, is not the only Chinese company to have been encouraged to develop its own conversational artificial intelligence robot.according to the AFP news agency.

AI bots have become more popular lately thanks to ChatGPTcreated by the OpenIA company, which Microsoft has announced that it will invest $10 billion in it over the next few years.. This isn’t the Redmond giant’s first investment in the company founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, the Windows creator with a real stake in the company. The company expressed interest in integrating the tool into its own search engine, Bing, later this year.. At the same time, Microsoft is developing Vall-Ea text-to-speech (TTS) language model capable of imitating any voice with only a 3-second recording.

The potential of artificial intelligence bots has not gone unnoticed by large companies in Silicon Valley, especially for AlphabetGoogle’s parent company, which recently announced that it will iinvest 370 million euros in Anthropic, one of the main rivals of OpenIA..

According to the “New York Times”, there is some concern within the Mountain View society about ChatGPT and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly asked his team to delineate the potential threat this tool would pose to its most famous and widely used search engine in the world. According to some tech experts, ChatGPT could be the first real threat to Google in two decades.