The Chinese Internet giant Baidu launched its conversational robot Ernie Bot on Thursday, August 31, its answer to the American ChatGPT, only available for the Chinese market for the time being.
“We are delighted to announce that Ernie Bot is now fully available to the general public, starting August 31,” Baidu said in a statement. “In addition to Ernie Bot, Baidu is set to launch a series of new AI-born applications that will allow users to fully experience the four core capabilities of generative AI: understanding, producing, reasoning and memory,” the company added.
The Californian start-up OpenAI had launched in November 2022 ChatGPT, a conversational system (“chatbot”) capable of formulating detailed answers in a few seconds on a wide range of subjects or writing dissertations. The prowess of ChatGPT is followed with passion in China, where the interface is however blocked without circumvention software such as VPN and foreign telephone number.
The Chinese Baidu was the first in its country to announce that it was working on a local equivalent to ChatGPT, which it presented in March. But its beta version was initially only available in a limited way, in Mandarin and certain dialects of China. The champion of the Internet and video games Tencent and the pioneer of online commerce Alibaba had also announced that they were working on the subject. Faced with this euphoria for these new tools, China announced in April that it would impose a “security inspection” on artificial intelligence tools before authorizing their marketing.
