Baidu stock surges after announcement of ChatGPT-style AI bot

It looks like everyone’s keen on jumping on the chat-AI bandwagon these days. At least that’s the feeling you get when you check the many companies announcing some form of a chatbot or another, among their products. The latest to join the party is Baidu, which announced that it’ll launch a ChatGPT-style service. This service is called “Wenxin Yiyan” or “ERNIE Bot” in English and will be released in March.

ERNIE is the acronym for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration and is based on a language model developed in-house. The Chinese giant is then in a race against Google to release its chatbot first. After this news broke, the Baidu (BIDU) stock jumped 16%. It only proves the expectation chatbots generate for investors and the market in general. But Baidu is just the latest one in a long string of top players becoming AI-aware lately.

Microsoft is one of the main backers behind ChatGPT, initially investing $1 billion in OpenAI. Microsoft’s main interest with ChatGPT seems to be, wait for it, integrating it into their search engine, Microsoft Edge. It’s no coincidence that most of these juggernauts are interested in these chatbots’ search engine integration as a priority.

The fact that Baidu got into the game also proves itself as a strategic move in China, whereas their top competitors are western search engines and companies.

As for ERNIE, it seems to offer similar capabilities as ChatGPT. According to a Baidu spokesperson, it has been used to write poems and essays. However, it’s also capable of generating images from text, a feature ChatGPT currently lacks. This is the third iteration of ERNIE, and the company feels the time has come to release it to a wider audience. However, Baidu still hasn’t commented on how exactly they’ll implement ERNIE on their search engine. It may very well become a separate entity.

Whether the stock move is pure speculation or not remains to be seen. However, nobody can deny these AI tools are very likely the tip of the spear for a whole range of new services. Since these could very well completely change how the Internet works, it’s attracting a lot of attention from everyone.

Even if AI chatbots don’t succeed in creating a paradigm shift, they’ll still be invaluable tools for further research and refining. In this sense, they will never fail. This is why the prospect of investing in these companies is very attractive currently. The technology behind these tools will be applied to other products and services, too.

However, one of the major threats these services face is backslash. There’s a lot of controversy right now regarding where AI stands when it comes to art, and whether these tools should be allowed to replace humans. Other problems AI chatbots have is inaccuracy, and bias. Even though they can be helpful, they can’t be blindly trusted with the information they provide. And if you can’t trust the results you’re looking for, what’s the point?

That said, AI chatbots are poised to stay for a long time, and it might be a good time to invest in them.

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