Baidu Builds Ernie Bot to Join the Worldwide AI Race

Baidu Builds Ernie Bot to Join the Worldwide AI Race

News by Marge Serrano
Published: February 07, 2023

China enters the artificial intelligence development scene with Baidu's latest project "Ernie Bot" poised to finish internal trials by March. 

This comes after a source disclosed to Reuter last week that Baidu will be unveiling a brand new standalone service in March that will also be incorporated into Baidu's search engines. 

Upon breaking the news in China, the multinational tech company's shares shot up to 13.4% largely attributed to the AI hype generated by ChatGPT and China lacking official access to American AI. 

Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration (Ernie), also called Wenxin Yinyan in Chinese, began its development in 2019. 

Baidu states, "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." 

Prior to its foray into the field of AI, Baidu delved into its own version of Facebook's Metaverse called Xi Rang. The Chinese tech trailblazer is also heavily invested in cloud computing, chip making and autonomous driving. 

On the other side of the Globe, Microsoft ramps up to unleash its own new AI service on Tuesday while looking to increase its funding for OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT. 

The software giant is also set to add image generation in Bing to challenge fellow big five and staunch competitor Alphabet, Google's parent company. 

Google recently announced its own AI advancements with Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's Chief Executive Officer, announcing Bard as its answer to ChatGPT in a blog. 

Bard is an AI chatbot that is currently under internal testing, like Ernie. Pichai adds that Google will also be incorporating AI in its search engine and that Bard will be officially released to the public in weeks to come. 

More than the upcoming market disruption, Silicon Valley is abuzz with artificial intelligence with its potential to massively scale businesses, with professionals already utilizing it to speed up and increase their work output. 

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