Baidu Talks Up ERNIE as China’s Answer to ChatGPT

Leading search engine Baidu Inc. is preparing to launch its own Chinese rendition of ChatGPT in March, the search giant said on Tuesday, hoping to cash in on a craze that has made a global celebrity of the AI-powered chatbot developed by OpenAI.

The ERNIE bot, known as Wenxin Yiyan (文心一言) in Chinese, is undergoing final tests before its planned public debut, Baidu told Caixin in a statement. ChatGPT has wowed users with its ability to provide realistic answers to questions, and even write prose and poetry that are in many cases hard to distinguish from human efforts.