Baidu announces internal testing of 'Ernie Bot' to complete soon

Chinese tech heavyweight Baidu Inc announced on Tuesday that it will complete internal testing of its AI chatbot service called "Ernie Bot", similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, in March.

The Beijing-based company has invested large sums of money in developing its Ernie system, a large-scale machine-learning model that has been trained on massive data over several years and possesses in-depth semantic comprehension and generation capabilities.

The company's shares surged 13 percent after affirming it is on track to publicly roll out its ChatGPT-like chatbot.

Baidu has been engaged in the artificial intelligence sector for more than ten years, and accumulated strengths in technology covering deep learning algorithms and framework, AI-powered chips, and language training model.

In January, the company introduced its latest AI-generated content technologies, which feature versatile content creation skills and allow creators to play the role of screenwriters, illustrators, and editors or animators, greatly bolstering the development of AIGC.