Ernie, meaning “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,” is a large AI-powered language model introduced in 2019, Baidu said. It has gradually grown to be able to perform tasks including language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation, it added.
Search engine giant Baidu’s Hong Kong-listed shares jumped as much as 13.4% on the news.
A person familiar with the matter told Reuters last week that Baidu was planning to launch such a service in March. The person said Baidu aims to make the service available as a standalone application and gradually merge it into its search engine by incorporating chatbot-generated results when users make search requests.
Generative artificial intelligence, a technology that can create prose or other content on command and free up white-collar workers’ time, has been gathering significant venture capital investment and interest from tech firms, especially in Silicon Valley.
Defining the category is ChatGPT, a chatbot from Microsoft-backed OpenAI that has been the centre of much buzz since it was released in November. ChatGPT is not available in China but some users have found workarounds to access the service.
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Google to launches ChatGPT rivalGoogle is all set to launch ‘Bard’, a new conversational AI chatbot, aimed at challenging ChatGPT.
Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai announced in a blog post that the company was opening Bard to a group of trusted testers, ahead of making it more widely available to the public in coming weeks.
“Two years ago we unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short). We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard,” read the blog post.
Google’s chatbot is supposed to be able to explain complex subjects such as outer space discoveries in terms simple enough for a child to understand. It also claims the service will also perform other more mundane tasks, such as providing tips for planning a party, or lunch ideas based on what food is left in a refrigerator.
“Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills,” the Google CEO wrote in his blog post.
