Baidu’s co-founder and CEO Robin Li delivers a keynote speech on the opening session of Baidu’s annual AI developers conference Baidu Create 2019 in Beijing, China, July 3, 2019.
Sun Yilei | Reuters
BEIJING — Chinese tech giant Baidu said Wednesday its artificial intelligence product Ernie bot is about to open to the general public next month.
The news comes as Microsoft-backed ChatGPT has skyrocketed in popularity for its ability to converse in a human-like tone, generating all the things from content summaries to business proposals.
ChatGPT shouldn’t be officially available in China, despite high local interest. Many Chinese corporations, including Baidu, have announced they’re developing similar tech.
“We are going to embed Ernie bot into Baidu search first and we’ll open it to the general public in March,” Baidu CEO Robin Li said Wednesday during an earnings call, in accordance with a FactSet transcript.
The corporate is working on “a revolutionary version of Baidu search built upon Ernie bot that comes with generative AI into our search algorithm in addition to content creation, and we’re adding interactive features,” he said. “Users will soon give you the option to interact directly with the brand new generative large language model.”
Baidu operates the dominant search engine in China, where Google is banned. Worldwide, Google has nearly the entire global market in mobile search, while Baidu is second with a lower than 1% share, in accordance with Statcounter data for January.
It’s unclear how Ernie bot’s capabilities compare with ChatGPT’s.
Baidu launched its Ernie project in 2019 and developed it “with well over 100 billion parameters,” Li said, noting its China-culture specific strengths. “It’s trained by serving billions of user search requests and other applications each day.”
In artificial intelligence, parameters are a measure of how much a model has learned.
GPT-3, the predecessor to ChatGPT, has 175 billion parameters, in accordance with a 2021 report from Stanford University. The report identified that was an exponential jump from GPT-2’s 1.5 billion parameters.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the corporate couldn’t speak for Baidu regarding its models and parameters.
The standard of AI-generated content stays an issue for businesses.
OpenAI said in a blog post this month that ChatGPT “users have shared outputs that they consider politically biased, offensive, or otherwise objectionable.” The U.S. startup said that in lots of cases it agreed, and was working to enhance ChatGPT.
In China, government efforts to regulate data and public information may affect how ChatGPT-like tech develops within the country, analysts identified. Beijing has also emphasized build up self-sufficiency in technology.
Nikkei Asia on Wednesday reported, citing sources, that regulators told Tencent and Alibaba-affiliate Ant Group not to supply access to ChatGPT services on their platforms, either directly or via third parties.
The article added, citing sources, that tech corporations in China might want to communicate with regulators before launching their very own ChatGPT-like services.
The report didn’t specify which regulators. China’s cybersecurity regulator, Baidu, Tencent and Ant didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment on the Nikkei report.
It isn’t unusual for businesses, especially those operating in sensitive sectors, to speak with Chinese regulators.
Baidu 12-month share performance
Despite widespread assessments that ChatGPT is transformative for tech, businesses do not have a transparent path to monetization yet.
Since Baidu is already the Chinese market leader in search, integrating it with Ernie bot won’t help the corporate expand its market share, John Freeman, vice chairman of equity research at CFRA, said on CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia.” “It isn’t an enormous as deal for them because it is for [Google parent] Alphabet.”
He has a sell rating on Baidu.
Nonetheless, Freeman said he was “really impressed” with how quickly Baidu’s algorithms were in a position to perform, especially when transforming text to video.
For Ernie bot, public partnership announcements include Baidu-backed video streaming platform iQiyi’s plans for connecting to the bot for search and AI-generated content. Baidu-backed electric automobile startup Jidu — which is about to start out deliveries this yr — also said it plans to include Ernie bot.
Baidu’s Li said Wednesday that “ChatGPT-types of features could potentially turn out to be a latest traffic entry point for web users and, due to this fact, expand the market size of search,” he said. “Meanwhile, it is going to also help our advertisers, our content creators and merchants.”
He added that AI-generated content will help Baidu “accumulate more short videos on our platform over time. And a direct profit can be increasing video viewership and ad revenue.”
Total revenue for 2022 fell by 1% to 123.68 billion yuan ($17.93 billion), in accordance with an organization release.
Despite little change in the corporate’s revenue within the fourth quarter from a yr ago, Freeman identified that operating margin expanded.
“That tells you intrinsically it’s a extremely healthy business,” he said. “These corporations are springloaded if we see a change within the environment.”
