'Ernie' will be one of Chinas most prominent entries in the AI race.
As a result of the company's announcement on Tuesday that internal testing of a ChatGPT-inspired project will be finished soon, shares of China's Baidu Inc. increased massively.
According to Bloomberg, the Hong Kong-listed shares had their best day since March, jumping 15% after the company said it was naming the service "Wenxin Yiyan," or "Ernie Bot" in English. Baidu's American depositary receipts also soared 15% in premarket trading. Baidu should complete internal testing in time for next month's launch, it said in a statement.
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A flurry of Chinese AI stocks also rallied, as the global frenzy around the Microsoft-backed chatbot sensation ChatGPT spurred speculative bets on the new technology.
Just two months after its launch, ChatGPT, which can generate articles, essays, jokes, and even poetry in response to prompts, has been rated the fastest-growing consumer app in history.
It has prompted many tech firms to double down on the heavily hyped generative AI technology, which until recently existed more in the background than as a solid contributor to the bottom line.
Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google, announced on Monday that it would launch a chatbot service and more AI for its search engine, while Microsoft plans to unveil its own AI on Tuesday, highlighting the growing rivalry to lead a new wave of computing.
Baidu, China's answer to Google, joined the frenzy on Tuesday.
It said Ernie, or "Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration," is a large AI-powered language model introduced in 2019 that has gradually grown to be able to perform tasks including language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation.
(With inputs from Reuters)