Chinese Internet giant Baidu has announced that it will launch its own generative AI chatbot in late 2023. Baidu officially confirmed news about launching a chatbot.

A Baidu spokesperson noted that the company plans to complete internal testing in March before making the chatbot publicly available. The bot will be called “Wenxin Yiyan文心一言” (“ERNIE Bot” in English).

The bot is based on the Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration (ERNIE) model, first introduced in 2019. ERNIE can perform a wide range of tasks including language understanding, language generation (ERNIE 3.0 Titan) and text-to-image generation (ERNIE-ViLG).”

ERNIE Bot speaks English and Chinese. IN document from 2021 details the ERNIE learning process and claims that the model outperforms all competitors, including ChatGPT (GPT-3), in many tasks.

Baidu recently discussed “a proposed supervised learning algorithm so that the model can formulate intelligent and coherent texts.” The company has done the hard work of creating such a system, developing in 2021 ” Ernie 3.0 Titan » is a pre-training language model with 260 billion parameters (ChatGPT uses 175 billion parameters).

Baidu’s announcement certainly drew attention, with the company’s share price jumping about 15% just hours after the company revealed details about the ERNIE Bot.