Baidu's Launch of ERNIE Bot Sparks Investor Excitement in the AI Market

Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant, announced on Tuesday that it will soon launch its own AI-powered chatbot similar to ChatGPT. The chatbot, named "Wenxin Yiyan" in Chinese or "ERNIE Bot" in English, will be launched in March after undergoing internal testing. ERNIE, which stands for "Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration," is an evolved version of a language model that Baidu had developed in 2019.

The spokesperson for Baidu shared that the ERNIE Bot has been designed to generate compelling responses to user prompts by being trained on vast amounts of data available online. The technology behind the chatbot is continuously being upgraded to enable it to learn multiple tasks like humans. This announcement caused Baidu's shares to soar by 16 percent in the Hong Kong stock market.

According to Daniel Ives, the managing director of Wedbush Securities, Baidu's investment in AI can be seen as both an offensive and defensive strategic move in China's tech industry, where Chinese big tech firms are battling to lead the AI race.

Google also recently announced its own chatbot tool, "Bard," in an apparent bid to compete with the success of ChatGPT. Like ChatGPT, Bard is built on a large language model and was opened up to "trusted testers" on Monday, with plans to make it available to the public in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is investing billions of dollars in OpenAI, the company that released ChatGPT publicly in November 2021. Details of the investment are expected to be announced later on Tuesday. The tie-up between Microsoft and OpenAI is estimated to be worth around $10 billion and is considered a game-changer by Ives as the ChatGPT bot is one of the most innovative AI technologies in the world today.

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