We reported about a week ago that Chinese multinational technology company Baidu is set to roll out its own version of the popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot. The company has since confirmed to CNN that it is set to complete the internal testing of its AI tool this March, which will be called "Ernie Bot."
Ernie, which stands for "Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration," is Baidu"s AI-powered large language model that was introduced in 2019. The model, which will serve as the foundation for Ernie Bot, has reportedly become capable of language understanding and generation, and text-to-image generation.
According to people familiar with the matter, Baidu aims to make Ernie Bot available as a standalone application. The company then plans to integrate the tool into its search engine. This means that users will get chatbot-generated results when they make search queries.
Baidu is not the first company that"s integrating AI into its products and services. Just recently, Google introduced Bard, a new conversational chatbot that will incorporate Google"s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) to provide anwsers to questions and inquires. Microsoft is also set to introduce a ChatGPT-powered Bing that can answer questions in a conversational manner. The Redmond tech giant also brought image generation software DALL∙E 2 to Azure OpenAI, making it easy for users to generate images through image or text input.
Source: CNN