Beijing, China – Baidu, China’s leading technology company, announced today that it has received approval from the Chinese government to publicly release its conversational AI bot called Ernie. This marks a major milestone for Baidu’s AI efforts and for the advancement of artificial intelligence in China.
Baidu first unveiled Ernie in March of this year, showcasing its ability to hold natural conversations, generate text, translate languages, and even write poetry and prose. However, at the time, Ernie was not approved for public use.
After months of testing and tweaking the technology behind Ernie, Baidu finally gained regulatory approval on August 31st, 2023. Now, Ernie will be made available to the general public, allowing Chinese citizens to interact with this intelligent bot.
Ernie is built on Baidu’s own natural language processing platform called Ernie, which contains over 100 billion parameters and is trained on massive datasets of conversational text. This gives Ernie the ability to understand nuanced language and engage in thoughtful dialogue.
The approval of Ernie signals a shift in China’s recent scrutiny of artificial intelligence technologies. While the government has implemented stricter regulations around AI in recent years, the acceptance of Ernie appears to demonstrate more openness to practical AI applications.
Baidu aims to implement Ernie in a variety of consumer settings, such as customer service, education, and entertainment. Ernie may also be used internally at Baidu to improve search algorithms, ad targeting, and more. With its advanced capabilities, Ernie has the potential to be a versatile virtual assistant for Chinese internet users.
Baidu is not alone in developing this kind of AI chatbot technology. Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent have also created their own virtual assistant bots, albeit not yet approved for public release. The race is on between these major Chinese firms to dominate the conversational AI space in their home market.
With Ernie soon to be in the hands of ordinary citizens, Baidu has staked an early claim. The successful rollout of Ernie across China would be a massive achievement in AI for Baidu and could propel China to be a world leader in artificial intelligence innovation.
