Baidu to deploy conversational AI across search, in-car entertainment and more

Baidu today revealed more details about its much-anticipated intelligent Ernie Bot, widely seen as the search giant's counterpart to ChatGPT. Ernie Bot is built atop Baidu's large language model Ernie that released in 2019. In May last year, the third generation of Ernie launched.

Here's how Baidu plans to integrate Ernie Bot into its ecosystem of services, said the firm's founder and CEO Robin Li in a letter to staff today.

"The integration of ERNIE Bot with Baidu Search will lead to a generational change in the search experience." Sound familiar? This will likely be something akin to Bing with ChatGPT built in.

"In addition to providing better search service and answers, we will offer a new interactive and chat experience, as well as provide uniquely generated content that will greatly enrich the content ecosystem and supply, becoming a new traffic entry point."

This part is a bit vague, but it might have something to do with Baidu's content distribution platform, which is currently supplied by a network of news agencies, corporate accounts and individual bloggers. Could Ernie Bot be used to generate more personalized content for users?

"ERNIE Bot will also provide services to the public through Baidu AI Cloud. Previously, the choice of cloud vendors was based primarily on basic cloud services such as computing power and storage. In the future, the focus will be on the framework, the model, and the synergy between the model, framework, chip and application. This shift will fundamentally rewrite the rules of the game in the cloud computing market."