China’s Internet giant Baidu is launching an AI chatbot service in March

China’s Internet giant Baidu is launching an AI chatbot service in March

Chinese search giant Baidu is planning to release an AI chatbot similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A person close to the development confirmed that the application will roll out in March and would be fixed in Baidu’s primary search services.

The yet-unnamed tool will aid users in conversation-style services, support and engagement, thereby possibly replacing support personnel and live operators. Baidu’s latest development comes just a few weeks after OpenAI’s ChatGPT made waves upon its launch in November 2022. ChatGPT amassed more than a million users within days, thanks to its articulate answers and detailed problem-solving approach.

Chinese search giant Baidu to launch AI chatbot

According to a Bloomberg report, the source also revealed that Baidu’s ERNIE system will form the base of the upcoming chatbot tool. For the unversed, ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration) is a machine-learning model trained on data for many years.

ERNIE has garnered appreciation in the NLP community for outperforming Google’s BERT in various Chinese language tasks.

What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a very famous AI programme that answers complex questions in a conversational manner.  The language-based model is fed large amounts of data to accurately predict the next word in a sentence. It takes data from textbooks and various articles on websites to furnish its own language for interacting with humans. The GPT-3 model is by far the most popular version of ChatGPT.

It enhances customer service, transforming the way humans interact with machines. Apart from generating responses, it can also write codes and articles. ChatGPT further helps in translation, debugging and even curating a story or a poem.

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman are some of the investors in OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company. Microsoft also invested $1 billion in OpenAI and is looking to include the chatbot in its search engine Bing.

(Main and featured images: Pexels)

This story first appeared on Lifestyle Asia Hong Kong