Baidu Accelerates Development of ChatGPT-Style Project

After announcing its ChatGPT-style project Ernie Bot, Chinese tech giant Baidu united two departments for tackling key technical problems and applying ChatGPT-related technologies to search and content products, local media outlet 36Kr reported.

On February 7, when Baidu officially announced the project, it started a countdown to “completing an internal test in March“. Many Baidu employees said that the top management team had given the order to see the product within one month.

To this end, Baidu has gathered together the company’s core talents in deep learning and natural language processing. Baidu CTO Wang Haifeng is the project commander while executives include Wu Tian, vice president of Baidu, and Wu Hua, chairman of Baidu Technical Committee, have also joined in.

Wu Tian joined Baidu in 2006 and is currently responsible for Baidu‘s AI technology platform and AI cloud products. Baidu‘s “PaddlePaddle”, a deep learning framework, is led by Wu Tian. Wu Hua is a leading figure in natural language processing technology within Baidu and one of the founders of Baidu‘s translation technology team.

As for the product form of Ernie Bot itself, according to several Baidu employees, Baidu has discussed two schemes, one is to launch an independent entrance (similar to Baidu‘s AI painting platform), and the other is to couple it with the company’s existing search portal, much like Microsoft’s ChatGPT Bing.

In addition to the search portal, Baidu is also looking for the possibility of combining the blog-style platform Baijiahao, short videos and AI-generated content (AIGC). An internal employee of Baidu said that the company would like to produce videos with pictures and texts on Baijiahao through AIGC, and then drive up traffic that way.

“Baidu‘s graphic and video quality has been criticized, but by producing content through AI, the content quality can be improved in a very light way.” The employee said, “About 100,000 pictures and texts appear on Baijiahao every day, half of which can be transformed into videos.”

SEE ALSO: JIDU to Apply Baidu’s ChatGPT-Style Project to Intelligent Driving

ChatGPT signed up its 100 millionth user recently, a milestone reached just 64 days after its November 30 launch. However, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, a technology company behind ChatGPT, said in an exclusive interview with Hard Fork, a technology podcast program published by the New York Times, “For any new technology, we can’t perfectly predict all its problems and solutions, so we need to constantly learn and improve from human feedback. What is important is that people need to take AI safety and ethics seriously.”

In addition, he said that when everything is ready, OpenAI will release a more powerful version of ChatGPT, but now is not the time.