Robin Li (or Li Yanhong in Chinese), founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, introduces the new AI-powered digital assistant “Duer” during the 2015 Baidu Technology Innovation Conference on September 8, 2015 in Beijing, China.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty Images
Shares of Baidu surged by more than 13% in Hong Kong as the company said it will launch its own artificial intelligence chatbot.
The stock rose to $159.80 Hong Kong dollars per share, or 13.48% higher in Asia’s morning trade. That’s the stock’s highest level since mid-Feb 2022.
The company said in a statement that its AI chatbot project will likely complete internal testing in March before being made public, and that it will be named “Ernie bot” in English or “Wenxin Yiyan” in Chinese.
Baidu’s announcement, which confirmed earlier reports, comes after Microsoft-backed ChatGPT has surged in popularity. Google recently announced a similar service, Bard A. I.
Ernie stands for “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,” Baidu said, describing it as a “large language model” that was introduced in 2019.
“What distinguishes ERNIE from other language models is its integration of extensive knowledge with massive data, resulting in exceptional understanding and generation capabilities,” Baidu said.
“It has since evolved into a series of advanced big models that are capable of handling a wide range of tasks, such as language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation,” it said.
In a presentation earlier this year, Chief Technology Officer Haifeng Wang emphasized the importance of deep learning as the core of artificial intelligence and that it’s showing “increasingly strong potential.”
“If you can utilize these content creation abilities to the greatest extent, then you can complete many important tasks of a film production,” Hua Wu, Chairwoman of Baidu Technology Committee, said of artificial intelligence generated content at the event.