Baidu will complete the testing of its “chatbot” project in March







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BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s Baidu said on Tuesday it would complete internal testing of a chatbot-like project similar to ChatGPT called “Ernie Bot” in March as interest in artificial intelligence ( IA) generative intensifies.

The Baidu title listed on Wall Street climbed 15% in pre-market trading.

The global frenzy around the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT “chatbot” has spurred speculation about this new technology which, until recently, was not really helping the bottom line.

Just two months after its launch, the chatbot ChatGPT, which is able to generate articles, cooking recipes and even jokes on demand, has become the fastest growing consumer application in history.

Baidu said Ernie Bot, created in 2019, has gradually grown to be able to perform tasks such as language comprehension and generation as well as text and image creation.

A source familiar with the matter told Reuters last week that Baidu plans to launch the service in March and it will be available as a standalone app, gradually integrated with the search engine.

ChatGPT and major Google services are not available in China, although some users have found workarounds to access these tools.

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, announced on Monday the experimental launch of a “chatbot” service in order to compete with ChatGPT and more AI for its search engine.

(Reporting by Yingzhi Yang and Brenda Goh, French version by Dina Kartit, editing by Kate Entringer)












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