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BEIJING, February 23 (TMTPOST)— Chinese tech giant Baidu announced to integrate its major businesses including search with Ernie Bot, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered conversational bot like OpenAI"s wildly popular CHATGPT.

Source: Visual China

In his letter to employee released on Wednesday, Baidu CEO Robin Li reconfirmed to launch Ernie Bot in March and called it the second generated AI offering of his company next to Wenxin Yige, an AI-generated art platform rolled out in last August.

“We plan to integrate multiple major businesses with Ernie Bot. Its integration with search will lead the intergenerational change of search experience,” wrote Li. “We will also offer a new interaction and chat experience, as well as unique generated content, which will greatly enrich the content ecology and supply, attract more users, and have the opportunity to create entrances for new traffic.”

In the letter, Li said that Ernie Bot would provide external services through Baidu AI Cloud. He expected such integration to fundamentally change the rule of cloud computing because businesses will focus more on the quality of frameworks, models, and the synergy among models, frameworks, chips, and applications, instead of basic cloud services such as computing power and storage.

Li also showed Ernie Bot’s prospect in automotive driving. The bot’s large model to be equipped with smart cockpit series products developed by Apollo Go, Baidu"s autonomous ride-hailing service, will allow intelligent vehicles to have a generation-leading human-vehicle interaction experience, Li commented. He added the integration of Ernie Bot and smart speaker Xiaodu would significantly improve the experience of the speaker’s multiple rounds of conversations with users, making it smarter and more considerate to become a more versatile smart assistant.

“Everyone is talking about how disruptive of AI is. The emergence of generative AI and large model intelligence is a new opportunity brought by a new computing paradigm, which means AI technology has developed to a critical point, and the tech will inevitably change all walks of life,” according to Li. He expressed optimism on China"s AI market as it is about to usher in “explosive demand growth and the unlock of its commercial value will be unprecedented and exponential”. “As the best representative of the long-term growth of China"s AI market, Baidu is standing on the top of the wave,” he added.

Earlier this month, Baidu confirmed news about launch of Ernie Bot and anticipated the app to be available for the public when it ends internal testing in March. The company said it has acquired “all the ChatGPT-related technologies”, and Ernie Bot is at the layer of model in its full-stack four-layer AI architecture.