Baidu shares rose 16% last night when it announced the launch of ERNIE Bot, a an AI chatbot that will be available in March in the footsteps of ChatGPT and Barda, Google’s response, which was also announced yesterday.

ChatGPT, a trendy chatbot, shakes up the technology world. Its massive popularity (it added 100 million users in just one month) set off alarms in big tech, especially at the headquarters of the search engine giants.

Microsoft has already announced a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and the integration of the chatbot into its Bing search engine and other services. Google, which has the most to lose due to its search dominance, has also made a move, and now comes the Chinese giant’s response.

ERNIE Bot, next

Named “Wenxin Yiyan” in China, it will be launched internationally as ERNIE Bot, meaning “enhanced representation through knowledge integration”is based on a language model that Baidu first developed in 2019. Since then, the project has evolved and is now in its third iteration.

Baidu didn’t provide details on what its tool would look like or whether it would appear as a feature in its popular search engine, but all indications are that will be very similar to ChatGPT. According to a company spokesperson “What sets ERNIE apart from other linguistic models is its ability to integrate extensive knowledge from big data, resulting in exceptional comprehension and generation capabilities”.

From Baidu they say that the ERNIE model exceeds all parameters to the ChatGPT technology (Gpt-3.5), thanks to the neural network with 260 billion parameters, the largest known. Tasks it can perform include language comprehension, language generation, and text-to-image generation.

necessary regulation

AI-based chatbots are nothing new, with their origins dating back to the 1960s. Their operation today is the same as it was then, essentially a “conversational dialogue” between man and machine. But the increase in capacity has been impressive and there are many voices calling for regulation.

Same CTO of ChatGPTMira Murati, recently called for a regulatory framework for his own solution and that of other artificial intelligence technologies will have a significant impact on society and their possibilities are perversely used “bad actors”for cyber attacks or worse.

It is significant that the head of fashion chatbot technology herself is asking o.a “involvement of regulators, governments and all other stakeholders”. And it’s these AI technologies that have the potential to shape our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine, and it’s imperative to take action to ensure that these technologies are used responsibly and ethically.