ChatGPT spurs AI product race as Baidu, ByteDance and other Chinese tech giants push out new bots and art generators
- Baidu, ByteDance and Meituan have unveiled new AI-powered products, some spun off from existing apps, before they have any ChatGPT-like services ready
- Several tech firms in China, including Alibaba and Tencent, have committed to releasing their own chatbots that can rival OpenAI’s
While Baidu has committed to releasing its own ChatGPT alternative Ernie Bot as early as next month, it also unveiled a less sophisticated chatbot last week called Xiaokan Planet. The app offers users two virtual companions who can send text messages and use voice messages to lull people to sleep or wake them up.
Xiaokan started as a feature of Baidu’s virtual keyboard app last year. It is now being spun off into a dedicated app as the search giant tries to gain more traction in the AI industry amid a frenzy of interest ignited by ChatGPT, which San Francisco-based start-up OpenAI launched last November.
A Baidu representative said Ernie Bot will be accessible through chatting with Xiaokan, “to have richer forms of interaction with users”.
Baidu has for years been making efforts to become China’s AI powerhouse by investing trillions of yuan into developing models for use cases such as autonomous driving. In 2021, the company unveiled its Ernie 3.0 Titan pre-trained language model with 260 billion parameters.
PaddlePaddle, an open-source deep learning platform launched in 2018, had the largest market share in the country in terms of usage as of last July, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology.
ByteDance has also been looking to level-up its AI capabilities, which today are best known for powering the recommendation system behind the viral success of TikTok and its Chinese version Douyin.
Baidu bets future on developing China’s answer to ChatGPT
It has most recently put its AI prowess to work in a new product called “AI painting” in the news aggregation app Jinri Toutiao, which turns any photo into an image that looks like a painting.
It was originally a video filter on Douyin and has been used by more than 30 million people, according to Douyin data.
They must select the style from one of the dozens of paintings provided and can pick the objects they want to be featured in the image.
The popularity of ChatGPT has put a spotlight on generative AI products that can produce a wide variety of content.
The hit chatbot is not officially available in China, but some people have been using workarounds to try it out. It has caused such a stir in the global tech industry that Chinese firms have been racing to roll out their own versions.
