ChatGPT will soon face competition from all sides. After Google and its Sparrow project, it’s Chinese Baidu’s turn to tackle the field of conversational agents. A tool similar to that created by OpenAI is being developed internally, according to a company source relayed by Bloomberg.
Boost online research, first
Equivalent to the Google search engine in China, Baidu is currently developing a conversational agent similar to ChatGPT. A first version of the tool is expected in March 2023. The Chinese Internet juggernaut initially intends to improve its search results. Like OpenAI’s program, users will be able to converse naturally with the AI.
Baidu has a long history of investing billions of dollars in AI research to diversify its online business. The new agent developed by the firm should be based on Ernie, a learning model trained for several years. In 2021, company researchers claimed to have “trained a model of 10 billion parameters on a massive unsupervised corpus for the purpose of understanding and generating a natural language.”
What profitability?
Already in December 2022, Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, had mentioned the arrival of ChatGPT as an example for the company to follow. “I am very happy that the technology we think about every day can attract the attention of so many people”, he claimed, according to a memo seen by Bloomberg. A discussion during which the person in charge underlined the problems of financial profitability posed by a software open to the public. To operate, AI requires significant hardware resources and a large amount of energy. Making these new services profitable in a sustainable way could thus prove to be complex.
To get enough ROI, ChatGPT is backed with billions of dollars by Microsoft. The American giant is also starting to market paid APIs (programming interface) so that developers can access the service. A premium version of the chatbot is also under consideration.
