China’s Baidu is launching an AI chatbot in March

According to a recent rumor that came from a person familiar with the inner workings of Baidu, China’s largest internet search company, the firm is about to launch a new service. The service in question is an artificial intelligence chatbot, not unlike ChatGPT launched by OpenAI.

While the name of the upcoming chatbot is still unknown, the source revealed that it should go live a little over a month from now, sometime in March 2023.

Baidu’s chatbot about to go live

The unnamed source, who refused to be identified, has shared several other pieces of confidential information. For example, they revealed that Baidu’s intention is to launch its new chatbot as a standalone application, which will gradually be merged with its search engine.

If it ends up working like ChatGPT, it will likely also be able to collect vast amounts of data, and learn from it, in order to answer prompts by users in a human-like way. It will be able to offer information, like a search engine can, or to write text like a novelist.

While the Chinese market has a number of chatbots at the moment, most of them are currently simply focused on social interactions. However, ChatGPT is different, and Baidu’s upcoming bot presumably will be, as well. For example, ChatGPT performs much better than most when it comes to completing professional tasks, such as essay writing, programming, and alike.

Baidu intends to use the results that the chatbot will be generating when users make search requests, and give them answers right away, instead of simply posting links to semi-relevant websites.

After the information had leaked, a number of requests for comment were sent to Baidu, but the company refused to provide a statement at this time.

Investments into AI-based tech

Chatbots such as OpenAI’s product have grown to become a major focus of many tech firms. Microsoft, for example, invested $1 billion in OpenAI. Not only that, but the company worked to add OpenAI’s image-generating software to its own search engine, Bing. This was an attempt to match and potentially outperform Google.

Baidu itself invested a fortune in AI technologies. This included chips, cloud services, autonomous driving, and more. The company’s intention is to diversify its revenue sources, and since it believes that AI will be the future of technology, it sought AI-powered services that are showing the greatest potential.

Last month, the company held a developer conference where it revealed three AI-powered creators. Their technology has allowed them to provide various forms of content, and assume roles of animators, editors, screenwriters, illustrators, and potentially more down the line. This technology has been advancing rapidly, with major breakthroughs recently, which makes it quite exciting to see where it will go from here.