The Chinese billionaire Robin Li owns the search engine Baidu. When he said that he wanted to start a service like ChatGPT, its Hong Kong-listed shares went up right away. By midday on Tuesday, they were up more than 14%.
In a press release sent out Tuesday morning, the Beijing-based company said that Ernie Bot would be the name of its own AI-based chatbot, which it plans to launch after finishing internal testing in March. People say that work on a stronger chatbot started in September of last year. This is because Baidu has spent a lot of money in recent years studying AI to find new ways to make money.
A Baidu representative wouldn’t say whether or not users would have to pay for Ernie Bot, which is also called “enhanced representation through knowledge integration.” OpenAI, a company based in San Francisco that made ChatGPT, has just started selling a $20-per-month “premium” version to users. It’s good because you can use it during busy times and get answers to your questions faster. The name of it is ChatGPT Plus. With the help of cutting-edge conversational AI technology, ChatGPT has become very popular online since it came out in November 2016 and has gained over a million users in just a few days.
Also, Baidu isn’t the only Chinese business related to AI that is getting more attention from investors. Shares of companies like Beijing Deep Glint Technology, which is listed in Shanghai, and Hanwang Technology, which is listed in Shenzhen, went up last week because investors were looking for the country’s version of ChatGPT. Back then, the first rumors started to spread that Baidu was going to make a similar chatbot service.
But the company that runs the search engine needs to find a way to make money off of AI because people in China are getting information from more places, like the Instagram-like Xiaohongshu app and the short video platform Douyin. The billionaire Li is betting Baidu’s future on artificial intelligence (AI) and expanding into fields like self-driving cars, cloud computing, and semiconductor chips to make up for the fact that users are paying less attention to Baidu. For the September quarter, it made 32.5 billion yuan ($4.6 billion), which was more than expected and more than half of which came from online marketing.
Content Source: forbes.com
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