Baidu Unveils ChatGPT-Like Product Ernie Bot

Chinese internet company Baidu has unveiled its AI chatbot called Ernie Bot. The technology company held a closed-door meeting where it revealed the product to several interested partners. Meanwhile, the initial plan was to have a live-streamed product launch. On March 16, CEO Robin Li presented Ernie Bot to investors despite the fact that it was not fully ready at the time. The company showed it anyway due to the high demand for the chatbot. It lost about 0% as many observers expected a live display. Notably, Ernie stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration.

Baidu built the chatbot on the massive ERNIE large language model. The company revealed that over 120,000 companies had expressed their interest in using the natural language search function via AI technology. Hence, it decided to showcase the product in closed-door meetings. The CEO explained that Ernie Bot came to life as a result of several years of hard work and the company’s persistence in investing in AI. According to Li, 650 companies have signed up to use the bot, which is applicable in AI cloud, smart devices, self-driving cars, and searches.

Additionally, Ernie Bot is able to produce different media, unlike Open AI’s GPT-4, which can only take images and text input. Baidu explained that its Ernie Bot could generate images, texts, audio, and video from given text prompts. The new technology can also produce voice output in multiple dialects. As the Ernie-ViLG model was developed to convert text to different formats, Baidu said its ability to generate images is “totally self-developed.” Ernie Bot displayed more skills than when Baidu unveiled it a couple of weeks ago.

During the previous showcase on March 16, the ChatGPT-like technology proved competence in image generation, and text prompts. It could also compose poetry and produce audio in Chinese dialects. However, Baidu revealed in the latest unveiling that Ernie Bot can produce more. It can create human-like livestreams for virtual advertisements. It can also produce travel itineraries.

The popular ChatGPT sparked interest in made and caused many companies to launch their AI products. Microsoft’s massive investment in the technology also increased its popularity, after which Google announced a similar technology- Bard. Both Open AI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have shown impressive results since their releases.

Baidu is currently trading up 0.44% on the Nasdaq after closing down 2.27%. The record shows that the company has been increasing for the past year, adding almost 4% in the last twelve months. It has also spiked 33.53% since the year began and increased by nearly 37% in the last three months.