Baidu to finish testing ChatGPT-style project ‘Ernie Bot’ in March

China’s Baidu Inc said on Tuesday it would complete internal testing of a ChatGPT-style project called “Ernie Bot” in March, joining a global race as interest in generative artificial intelligence (AI) gathers steam.

Ernie, meaning “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,” is a large AI-powered language model introduced in 2019, Baidu said. It has gradually grown to be able to perform tasks including language understanding, language generation, and text-to-image generation, it added.

Search engine giant Baidu’s Hong Kong-listed shares jumped as much as 13.4 per cent on the news.