China's Baidu has made the ERNIE bot available to the general public. ERNIE is Baidu's answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT, a Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) bot and Large Language Model (LLM), which the company announced in March, this year.
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It also makes it the first AI bot to be available to the public in China. The country's AI regulations require companies to seek approval before releasing a product to the public, and according to Bloomberg, Baidu was one of the first companies to get the green light.
“In addition to ERNIE Bot, Baidu is set to launch a suite of new AI-native apps that allow users to fully experience the four core abilities of generative AI: understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory," Baidu said in a statement to the press.
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Baidu CEO Robin Li said that releasing the bot to the public will allow them to get human feedback, which will help refine the bot further.
ERNIE has been touted as one of the most expensive AI projects in China, incurring costs of over 21.4 billion yuan. Baidu plans to challenge Microsoft, Google and OpenAI in the Generative AI arms race, with full planned integration with the search engine, which is number one in China.
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