After Google’s expressed interest in making up for lost ground in Artificial Intelligence, it is not surprising that China is also working in the same direction.
Chatbots are among today’s most talked-about topics. And it just so happens that the Chinese search giant Baidu is looking to introduce an AI service similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. I.e., a system that can deliver conversational results to its users.
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Ernie Bot, what is the new AI project by Chinese search giant Baidu
Details are obviously very scarce. But for now it is rumored that it will be based on the proprietary “Ernie” system. I.e., a rather elaborate machine learning model that has apparently been further trained over the years. And which Baidu says excels in natural language understanding and generation.
The tool will allow users to get search results in the form of dialogue. Just as they do through OpenAI’s popular platform.
According to the rumours, the name Ernie Bot would represents a shortened and stylized version of “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration.“ Which is the artificial intelligence-based language model that Baidu introduced in 2019.
This will form the basis for Ernie Bot. Which through it will be able to understand texts, generate new ones, and respond in a conversational form.
According to sources close to the developments Baidu aims to make Ernie Bot available as a standalone application. And then, to move on to the next stage, which is integration into its search engine. This means that users will get results generated by the chatbot when they make search queries.
The AI chatbots trend, all the competitors to ChatGPT
The topic is hot, and Microsoft itself has invested $1 billion in Open AI, with the future goal of incorporating some aspects of ChatGPT into its Bing search engine. But, Google also sees this technology as a threat to its dominance in search. And is accelerating the development of its own conversational AI technology, namely Apprentice Bard.
Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has declared a “code red” for ChatGPT. And may be ready to showcase 20 or more AI products and a chatbot for its search engine at the Google I/O conference in May 2023.
Baidu has recently seen its growth slow. And it is no secret that it sees a ChatGPT-style chatbot as the potential answer and chance to increase the gap with competitors.
ChatGPT, the controversies about AI new developments
But it is not all gold that glitters. And ChatGPT has also drawn quite a bit of attention to its critical issues, such as errors found in articles written by the AI. Also, possible concerns of plagiarism, as well as the growing risks of new online scams related to the reckless use of this technological medium.
Not surprisingly, a growing number of universities around the world are banning its use.
However, as we have seen in recent weeks, there is a lot of movement around applications based on artificial intelligence systems. As mentioned, Google itself recently unveiled a similar solution called Bard. While Microsoft is already projected to integrate ChatGPT into Bing.
