Baidu’s CEO, Robin Li, said on Friday that the company will “very soon” officially launch Ernie 3.5, a generative AI large-language model that will power Baidu’s ChatGPT-like app Ernie Bot and improve its search engine. Li made the announcement at the Zhongguancun Forum, one of China’s most well-known technology forums, about two months after Ernie Bot was first shown to the public to mixed reviews.
Ernie bot, which is China’s closest answer so far to the US-made ChatGPT, was released on March 16 by Li. He gave a livestreamed presentation to journalists in which he walked them through a series of pre-recorded demos that showed what the Chinese chatbot could do.
Images shared by a Baidu representative in March in a media-facing group on WeChat, China’s most popular messaging service, show that the Chinese chatbot has more skills than it did when it was first released almost two weeks ago. Since then, Ernie Bot and other products that use the company’s generative AI large-language model have been in trial mode, with a small number of companies and users invited to try them out.
