Chinese multinational tech company Baidu has seen its shares rise, following the announcement to launch its artificial intelligence chatbot.
The company’s shares rose to 13.48% higher on Asia’s morning trade, while its stock rose to $159.80 Hong Kong dollars per share.
The company had recently confirmed that it is internally testing an AI chatbot called “Ernie Bot” which it plans to roll out in March after testing. Ernie stands for “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,” Baidu said, describing it as a “large language model” that was introduced in 2019.
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“What distinguishes ERNIE from other language models is its integration of extensive knowledge with massive data, resulting in exceptional understanding and generation capabilities.
“It has since evolved into a series of advanced big models that are capable of handling a wide range of tasks, such as language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation”, the company added.
While Ernie Bot’s language capabilities have received great feedback, it has raised a debate if it will be able to equal ChatGPT’s success, only time will tell.
Sources familiar with the development disclosed that the AI tool will be incorporated into Baidu’s main Internet search services, as the combination will allow users to get conversation-style search results much like Open AI’s popular platform ChatGPT.
Baidu has reportedly spent billions of dollars researching AI, following its efforts over the past years to transition from online marketing to deeper technology. The Chinese tech giant advances in AI so far include a booming autonomous ride-hailing arm that completed hundreds of thousands of rides in China last year, including offering the first fully driverless services in the country.
Managing director of Wedbush Securities, Daniel Ives revealed that Baidu’s AI investments can be seen as “both an offensive and defensive strategic move in China, noting that “Chinese Big Tech is battling in this AI race, with Baidu being a key player.
Baidu joins the likes of other tech companies such as Google and Microsoft that want to advance their platform through the infusion of an AI chatbot which is currently the rave of the moment.
Ever since the launch of ChaptGPT last November, it has put pressure on several tech companies which are currently developing a chatbot similar to that of ChatGPT.
The arrival of the Chatbot has shaken tech giant Google out of its routine, with the founders of the company who left three years ago, re-engaging and holding several meetings to respond to OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT, which has seen more than 20 A.I. projects in the works.
This has seen Google currently in works to launch “Bard’, a new conversational AI chatbot, aimed at challenging OpenAI’s ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft.