The Chinese search engine Baidu, market leader in the country, will launch its artificial intelligence for online search, in the same way as ChatGPT. It would be first in the race, Bing and Google working hard on the issue.
The Google search engine is not available in China due to non-compliance with Chinese government requirements. In the most populous country in the world, the one that has reigned for many years is Baidu. This Chinese giant has been known for years for developing artificial intelligence and should launch a chatbot for online research, inspired by what OpenAI’s ChatGPT is doing, according to information from Bloomberg.
Chinese Google wants its own ChatGPT for search
According to a journalistic source familiar with the matter, Baidu plans to ” implement an AI chatbot service similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT “. For the journalist Zheping Huang, this “ could represent China’s biggest entry in a race unleashed by the tech phenomenon».
Initially, this service, whose name has not yet been chosen, would be available in ” its main research services ». Illinois”will allow users to get search results similar to a conversation“. The first version of this rather special ChatGPT should arrive next March.
China is also developing its language models
as indicatedDigitalwho transmitted the informationBloomberg, this chatbot would be based on Ernie’s learning model that has been in development for several years. According to the scientific paper presented in June 2019, Ernie is developed at the Department of Computer Science and Technology and the Institute of Artificial Intelligence at Tsinghua University in Beijing, as well as in partnership with a Huawei lab.
It is intended as a response to Google’s BERT language model (developed in 2018). For researchers, BERT does not incorporate “knowledge graphs (KG), which can provide rich structured knowledge facts for better language understanding“. His model called ERNIE is capable of “make the most of lexical, syntactic and knowledge information simultaneously“. They pride themselves on the fact that Ernie is, if not better, then as good as BERT.
A few years later, Baidu researchers claimed to have “trained a 10 billion parameter model on a massive unsupervised corpus in order to understand and generate a natural language.»
Can a ChatGPT based search engine be profitable?
The newspaperBloombergremember: Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, acknowledged the potential profitability problems that a conversational chatbot could cause for online research. In fact, an artificial intelligence needs a significant amount of computing power. In addition, its use avoids having to search the search results and, therefore, clicking on the ads present there.
A concern that Google is obviously aware of: the web giant fears ChatGPT and is working on new AI-based tools. From Microsoft, we know that the company wants to merge Bing with ChatGPT. In addition, the firm has announced that it is investing billions of dollars in OpenAI, which develops conversational AI. The latter is also considering the first forms of monetization, through a professional subscription… at $42 per month. This is not counting a recent controversy surrounding ChatGPT: to improve the AI, workers in Kenya have been exploited.
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