Robin Li (or Li Yanhong in Chinese), Baidu’s founder, chairman and CEO, introduces the new AI-powered digital assistant “Duer” during the 2015 Baidu Technology Innovation Conference on September 8, 2015 in Beijing, China.
VCG | Visual China Group | Getty Images
shares of baidu Hong Kong surged more than 13% as the company said it would launch its artificial intelligence chatbot.
The stock traded higher at $159.80 Hong Kong dollars per share, or 13.48% in Asia’s morning trade. This is the stock’s highest level since mid-February 2022.
The company said in a statement that its AI chatbot project is likely to complete internal testing in March before being made public, and will be named “Ernie Bot” in English or “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese.
Baidu’s announcement, which confirmed earlier reports, comes after the rise in popularity of Microsoft-backed ChatGPT. Google recently announced a similar service, Bard AI.
Ernie stands for “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration”, Baidu said describing it as a “large language model”, which was introduced in 2019.
Baidu said, “What differentiates ERNIE from other language models is its integration of extensive knowledge with extensive data, resulting in extraordinary understanding and production efficiency.”
“It has since evolved into a series of advanced large models capable of handling a wide range of tasks such as language understanding, language generation and text-to-image generation.”
In a presentation earlier this year, Chief Technology Officer Haifeng Wang stressed the importance of deep learning as the core of artificial intelligence and how it is showing “increasingly strong potential”.
Hua Wu, chair of Baidu’s technology committee, said of artificial intelligence-generated content at the event, “If you can use these content creation capabilities to the greatest extent, you can accomplish many important tasks in filmmaking. “
