Chinese tech giants such as Baidu, Alibaba and NetEase are racing to keep up with recent advances in artificial intelligence in the West, touting projects they hope to achieve the same buzz generated by the release of ChatGPT. doing.
After months of announcing cost and headcount cuts, the large group is now optimistically presenting investment plans to rival OpenAI’s chatbots.
Zhou Hongyi, head of internet security company Qihoo 360, has characterized ChatGPT, a program that generates realistic text answers to human questions, as the beginning of the artificial intelligence revolution. “It has its drawbacks, but it also has endless possibilities,” he said on a talk show last week.
ChatGPT’s rivalry comes as the Chinese tech group has spent the better part of two years reeling from regulatory attacks and fighting for growth amid a COVID-induced slowdown.
Baidu is taking the most concrete early steps with plans to launch a chatbot named Ernie on its search engine within months, similar to Microsoft and OpenAI’s Bing Chat.
The bot’s underlying AI model has been in development since 2019, with the latest generation trained on 260 billion parameters. It’s comparable in size to his GPT3, the technology behind ChatGPT, but trained on a much smaller dataset.
Baidu is expected to reveal new details this week on how it will integrate chatbots into products like search, electric cars and smart assistants.
Bernstein analyst Boris Wang, who tracks China’s AI efforts, said, “Baidu is concentrating manpower and money in this area, which is why it has built one of China’s leading GPT platforms. most likely to do so,” he said. “They have a lot in store for the launch.”
