Baidu rolls out AI chatbot service to public

Chinese online search giant Baidu Inc on Thursday rolled out its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot service ERNIE Bot to the general public, according to the company.

The service can be accessed from various app stores and through its official website. In addition to ERNIE Bot, Baidu is also set to launch a suite of new AI-native apps, which leverage the capabilities of generative AI.

Baidu chairman and CEO Robin Li said by making ERNIE Bot available to hundreds of millions of Internet users, Baidu will collect massive valuable real-world human feedback.

This will not only help improve Baidu's foundation model but also iterate ERNIE Bot at a much faster pace, ultimately leading to a superior user experience, Li noted.

AI Chatbots, such as ERNIE Bot and ChatGPT, are trained on a massive amount of data from the Internet with the goal of generating human-like responses to natural language questions and prompts.

ERNIE Bot builds upon Baidu's ERNIE foundation model, first launched in 2019. Over the past decade, Baidu has invested more than 140 billion yuan (US$19.5 billion) in research and development, according to company data.