On Tuesday, shares of the Chinese search engine giant Baidu increased in Hong Kong after the company announced that it had almost completed testing an AI project similar to Microsoft’s ChatGPT.
Baidu said it has been working on Ernie, which stands for “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,” since 2019 and plans to finish internal testing in March.
Baidu said Ernie can now understand language, make language, and turn text into images.
Additionally, the news reports that Baidu is making significant progress towards releasing a product that could potentially rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT tool. This tool has made a major impact since its launch in November. ChatGPT is not very popular in China, where Baidu is based.
Competition in AI is heating up quickly. Microsoft is backing OpenAI, and Alphabet is making its tool to improve search and text composition. Others, like Meta Platforms and Tesla, have also invested a lot of money to build AI-powered features.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai revealed on Monday that his business would seek user feedback on Bard, a conversational AI tool, and release it to the public within weeks. In a Monday blog post, Pichai claimed Bard would leverage Internet data, which would work nicely with Google’s search function.
Google’s new chat tool runs on LaMDA, an artificial intelligence project, which performed so well in a test last year that one of its engineers referred to it as “sentient.” The company hasn’t said anything like this about LamDA.
The head of OpenAI, Sam Altman, will be at a Microsoft event on Tuesday where the company will give its update on AI.
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