Shares of Baidu rose sharply on Tuesday (+13%) on the Hong Kong stock exchange after the company that owns China’s most popular search engine announced that it would Will launch its own artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot..
According to a statement from the company, the project will complete internal testing in March before going public and will be named the “Ernie bot” in English and “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese. Ernie, who carries in development since 2019is an acronym for ‘Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration’.i.e., ‘Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration’.
“What distinguishes ERNIE from other language models is its. integration of extensive knowledge with massive data, resulting in exceptional capabilities for understanding and generating. Since then, it has evolved into a series of large, advanced models that are capable of handling a wide range of tasks, such as language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation.“, said the Asian company.
The news, although well received by the market, cannot be said to have come as a surprise. Earlier this year, the Chinese firm’s Chief Technology Officer, Haifeng Wang, highlighted the importance of ‘deep learning’ as the core of AI and noted that it was showing “increasingly strong potential” in recent times. “If these content creation capabilities can be fully utilized, many important tasks in a film production can be completed,” he explained.
Baidu, which has more than 600 million active users, is not the only Chinese company that has been encouraged to develop its own conversational artificial intelligence bot.according to the AFP news agency.
AI bots have become popular in recent times thanks to. ChatGPTcreated by the company OpenIA, which Microsoft has announced that it will invest $10 billion in it over the next few years.. This is not the first investment that the Redmond giant has made in the firm founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, since the creator of Windows has a genuine interest in integrating this tool into its own search engine, Bing, this same year.. In parallel, Microsoft is developing Vall-Ea language model for text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) that is capable of imitating any voice with only a 3-second recording.
The potential of artificial intelligence bots has not gone unnoticed by the big Silicon Valley firms, especially by AlphabetGoogle’s parent company, which recently announced that it will invest 370 million euros in Anthropic, one of OpenIA’s main rivals..
As reported by ‘The New York Times’, there are. some concern at the Mountain View company over ChatGPT. and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has reportedly asked his team to delimit the potential threat that this tool would pose to its search engine, the most famous and most used in the world. According to some technology experts, ChatGPT could be the first real threat to Google in the last two decades..
