Baidu Joins Global AI Race with Development of ChatGPT

Baidu Inc., a Chinese company, has seen its stock rise by 1.88%. This is good news for investors, as the company is doing well despite the current global economic conditions.

As artificial intelligence technology continues to develop, companies are racing to commercialize it. ChatGPT is one example of this next generation of AI that has the potential to transform the internet.

The company is developing an AI-powered chatbot similar to OpenAI's popular ChatGPT and plans to integrate it into its main search engine in March, sources familiar with the matter said.

Baidu's move to develop its own version of the technology would place it among a few global tech companies with this capability. The technology has generated a lot of interest among consumers and businesses, and has placed pressure on incumbents to update their product-development strategies.

Baidu plans to be the first company to bring the ChatGPT technology to consumers in China. However, due to state censorship, access to ChatGPT is currently blocked in China.

Baidu's plans come as the competition between Washington and Beijing to bolster their respective countries' leadership in strategic emerging technologies intensifies.

OpenAI's ChatGPT is built on top of a core breakthrough that Google developed in 2017. This algorithm has also been adapted by Baidu and is being used as the foundation for its chatbot.

In a speech to employees in late December, Baidu CEO Robin Li spoke about ChatGPT, saying it represents new opportunities, according to a transcript on Baidu's internal website. This was seen by The Wall Street Journal.

"We have some really cool technology, but can we turn it into a product that everyone needs?" Mr. Li said, referring to AI-driven technologies including the chatbot. "This is actually the hardest step, but also the most important and influential."

Baidu is planning something big, according to Bloomberg. No details have been released yet, but it's sure to be something big from the Chinese tech giant. Stay tuned for more details.

Baidu, which has lagged behind its Chinese internet peers in terms of growth, is now trying to reinvent itself as an AI company. It has invested billions of dollars in cutting-edge technologies like self-driving cars and AI-powered chips.

Google has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) research for many years. Using its vast repository of text data from its search-engine business, it has focused in particular on an area of AI research known as natural-language processing. This area of AI has experienced major leaps in advancement in the past few years, leading to the recent surge of AI technologies, including ChatGPT.

Baidu has developed a deep-learning model known as Ernie, which it has used to improve its search results. The company has since developed dozens more Ernie models and extended their capabilities to include image and art generation.

Baidu is now using Ernie as the foundation for its chatbot, and is training it on both Chinese- and English-language sources inside and outside China’s firewall, some of the people said. In the past, Baidu has trained Ernie using sources that include Wikipedia, BookCorpus, Reddit and Baidu’s ecosystem of products—such as Baidu Baike and Baidu News—according to its open-source research papers. Ernie is constantly learning new information from these sources, which allows it to better communicate with users.

Baidu plans to limit its chatbot’s outputs in accordance with the state’s censorship rules, one of the people said. OpenAI also applies restrictions to ChatGPT’s outputs in an effort to avoid toxic hate speech and politically sensitive topics.

ChatGPT is a chatbot that has been trained on vast amounts of text data from the internet. It is capable of answering all manner of user questions in fluent conversational prose. However, the chatbot cannot guarantee accurate answers and at times has delivered sexist or racist comments, industry researchers have said.

As chatbots become more advanced, tech companies are racing to integrate them into their products. ChatGPT, which can hold conversations, is seen as having the most potential to disrupt the status quo in search.

Microsoft has announced new investment in OpenAI, totaling up to $10 billion. This infusion of cash will be used to develop ChatGPT, a natural language processing tool. Microsoft plans to integrate ChatGPT into its existing products, such as the Bing search engine.

Google's LaMDA technology made its debut in 2021, and Meta Platforms Inc. released a chatbot known as BlenderBot in 2020. Neither company has revealed plans to integrate the technology into their platforms.