China's Baidu Reveals Plans To Launch ChatGPT-Style 'Ernie Bot'

China's Baidu said on Tuesday it would complete internal testing of a ChatGPT-style project called "Ernie Bot" in March, joining a global race as interest in generative artificial intelligence (AI) gathers steam. Reuters reports: Ernie, meaning "Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration," is a large AI-powered language model introduced in 2019, Baidu said. It has gradually grown to be able to perform tasks including language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation, it added. Search engine giant Baidu's Hong Kong-listed shares jumped as much as 13.4% on the news.

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters last week that Baidu was planning to launch such a service in March. The person said Baidu aims to make the service available as a standalone application and gradually merge it into its search engine by incorporating chatbot-generated results when users make search requests. In a blog post on Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the company is working on a ChatGPT competitor named Bard.

Time for /. bot

[locater16]

It's a great totally real AI product that will overtake Google in Search, Meta in adverstising, Apple in using Chinese child labor, and all of China in strangling the British Empire using a monopoly on tea prices. Just look at the realistic and totally not faked output that are the responses to this post! (Note to all angel investors, please contact us via [e-mail])

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

Nice rant about China, but Baidu's main research center is in California.

Re:

[PeeAitchPee]

You're just mad because they didn't name the bot after you.

Re:

[mrex]

Natalie Portman'll be an octogenarian and the Slashdot AI will still be talking about stuffing hot grits down her bloomers.

Just waiting for Bert

[chthon]

"There's a banana in your ear, Ernie!"

Re:

[antdude]

I hope Ernie will sing with his rubber ducky. ;)

Re:

[NicknameUnavailable]

The Winnie the Pooh crossover episode will be a bloody mess.

Re:

[real_nickname]

BERT is already a langage model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[Chris Mattern]

Sorry, Ernie Bot can't hear you, there's a banana in his ear.

Re:

[SoftwareArtist]

BERT came first. ERNIE is a pun on it. Here's the original paper. [arxiv.org]

Killer app

[Iamthecheese]

The first country to have a useful, reliably correct, nuanced answer machine as a search engine will receive a huge propaganda bonanza just from that government and culture having an effect on billions of search results. Just like Hollywood painted the world's imagination for decades this chat bot, whichever it is, will do that same for the world's understanding of, well, the world.

Bert?

[antdude]

OK, which country will be doing Bert then? :P

Unfortunate Name?

[jonbryce]

In the UK, ERNIE means "Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment", and is the computer that draws the numbers for Premium Bonds, which is a bit like a lottery.

Re:

[SandorZoo]

No, he drove the fastest milk cart in the west.

Re:

[Motleypuss]

Mm; sounds like ChatGPT already. We won't get truly useful AI until they learn what concepts means, IMO.

What will it say ...

[Alain Williams]

if you ask it to write an essay about what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 ?

Re:What will it say ...

[chthon]

Sorry, Dave, I can't do that.

Re:

[TheMiddleRoad]

Oof.

Re:

[Motleypuss]

Look Dave, I see you're upset about this. I think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over. ;)

Re:

[PeeAitchPee]

Easy. It'll dock your social credit score and then report you to the Ministry of Truth for 5 years of Re-Education through Labor.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Presumably the same as Baidu search does now. You get a mixture of results (in English) about Tiananmen Square and what a nice place it is to visit, plus a few denying that anything really bad happened there. If you search in Chinese it's actually pretty similar.

Fastest milkman in the West?

[bart_smit]

Ernie has a reputation to keep up https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

Seriously, not Bert...read google news....

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

People, People, haven't you been reading Slashdot lately?

Ernie ... meet ... Brad.

Cheeeeeze... I mean Bard.
Bard. Brad. Who can tell the diff? .... I'll show myself out now...