China’s Baidu said on Tuesday it would complete internal testing of an AI project called “Ernie Bot” in March, joining a global race as interest in generative artificial intelligence gathers steam. Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration (Ernie) is a large artificial intelligence-powered language model introduced in 2019. Language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation are some of the tasks it has been able to perform.
According to a report, Baidu wants to make the service available as a stand-alone application and eventually integrate it into its search engine. Generative artificial intelligence, technology that can create prose or other content on command has been gathering significant venture capital investment and interest from tech firms.
Since it was released in November, the chatbot from Microsoft-backed Openai, ChatGPT has been the center of much buzz. The company worked to add OpenAI’s image-generation software to its Bing search engine.
In a post on Monday, Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Chief Executive, said that his company is opening a generative AI service called Bard to test users for feedback, followed by a public release in the coming weeks.
Baidu is a leader in China on other tech trends. The company also launched “XiRang”, which it said was China’s first metaverse platform. The company has invested a lot in artificial intelligence, including in cloud services, chips and self-driving cars.