China's Baidu to release ChatGPT rival in March, reports

Baidu's Ernie is one of the most advanced NLP models in the world

Baidu plans to release a competitor to OpenAI's ChatGPT in March, according to reports.

Baidu operates China's largest search engine, and the company plans to embed its AI chatbot within its search service, according to reports by Bloomberg and Reuters, which quote an anonymous source.

Chinese tech companies have been pumping significant resources into AI development in recent years, and Baidu's Ernie natural language processing (NLP) deep learning model, which is trained on structured knowledge graph data as well as unstructured text, is one of the most advanced NLP models in the world.

Most current Chinese chatbots in China currently focus on social interaction, rather than content writing and summarising, which is where ChatGPT represents a significant advance. Baidu plans to incorporate chatbot-generated results when users make search requests, instead of just links, a source told Reuters.

If the reports are accurate, Baidu's effort would join a field that has been jolted into a frenzy of action by the emergence of ChatGPT in November.

Google called ‘code red' on OpenAI's chatbot, seeing it as a serious competitor to its own NLP models and search business, promising to invest in new AI projects even while cutting staff numbers. Meanwhile, Microsoft added another $10 billion to its existing $1 billion stake - making it the largest stakeholder. It plans to add ChatGPT to its Bing and Office services.

As reported by Bloomberg News, Baidu CEO Robin Li said in December that his company could take a lead in the space brought to prominence by ChatGPT.

"I'm so glad that the technology we are pondering every day can attract so many people's attention. That's not easy," Li said, in a transcript of an internal chat seen by the news organisation.

However, he went on to say that creating a desirable product is a much harder job than creating a viable model.

Despite being heavily censored, internet chats show Chinese people experimenting with ChatGPT and being impressed by the results.

Cloud giant Alibaba, WeChat owner Tencent, and ByteDance, which operates social media platform TikTok, are all inventing heavily in AI, and there is a large venture capital-funded AI-focused startup ecosystem in the country too.