China’s tech giants, including Baidu, Alibaba, and NetEase, are racing to match the West’s recent advances in artificial intelligence, announcing projects they hope will achieve the same buzz. which is done with the release of ChatGPT.
After months of announcing cost cuts and headcount reductions, major groups are now optimistically presenting investment plans to rival OpenAI’s chatbot, while trademark trolls line up to claim those word related to the achievements of ChatGPT.
Zhou Hongyi, head of Internet security company Qihoo 360, described ChatGPT, a program that produces realistic text answers to questions asked by people, as the start of the artificial intelligence revolution. “It has shortcomings but unlimited potential,” he said in a talk-show discussion last week.
The race to match ChatGPT comes as China’s tech groups have spent the better part of two years recovering from regulatory attacks and fighting for growth amid a slowdown. caused by COVID.
Baidu is taking the most concrete early steps, with plans to launch a chatbot named Ernie on its search engine in the next few months, similar to Microsoft’s Bing Chat and OpenAI.
The AI model underlying the bot has been developed since 2019, with the latest generation trained on 260 billion parameters — comparable to GPT3, the technology behind ChatGPT, in terms of size, even when trained on a much smaller data set.
Baidu plans to reveal new details this week on how the chatbot will be integrated into its products, including search, electric vehicles, and smart assistants, according to a person close to the company.
“Baidu is focusing its talent and money, so they are the most likely to build one of the leading GPT platforms in China,” said Boris Van, a Bernstein analyst who tracks China’s AI efforts. “They have a lot riding on the launch.”