China’s Baidu developing Its own ChatGPT, joining latest global AI race

The company is developing an AI-powered chatbot similar to OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT and plans to integrate it into its main search engine in March, people familiar with the matter said.

The move would place Beijing-based Baidu among a few tech companies globally to have its own version of the technology, which has generated buzz among consumers and businesses, and placed pressure on incumbents, which have started to update their product-development strategies.

Baidu is set to be the first to bring the technology to consumers in China, where the state censors the internet and access is blocked to ChatGPT.

Baidu’s plans come as competition heats up between Washington and Beijing to bolster their respective countries’ leadership in strategic emerging technologies.

They also highlight the fluid, cross-border nature of AI research where open-source is the norm. OpenAI built ChatGPT atop a core breakthrough that Alphabet Inc.’s Google developed in 2017—an algorithm that Baidu also adapted and is now using as the foundation for its chatbot, according to some of the people.

Chief executive Robin Li touched on ChatGPT in a late-December speech to some employees, saying it represents new opportunities, according to a transcript on Baidu’s internal website that was seen by The Wall Street Journal.

“We have such cool technology, but can we turn it into a product that everyone needs?" Mr. Li said, referring to AI-driven technologies including the chatbot. “This is actually the hardest step, but also the greatest and most influential."

Bloomberg earlier reported on Baidu’s plans.

Baidu, whose growth hasn’t kept up with that of its Chinese internet peers, has been pushing to refashion itself into an AI company, investing billions of dollars in technologies including self-driving cars and chips designed to power AI applications.

Using its vast repository of text data from its search-engine business, it has focused in particular on an area of AI research known as natural-language processing, which has experienced major leaps in advancement in the past few years and led to the recent surge of AI technologies, including ChatGPT.

In 2019, Baidu developed a deep-learning model known as Ernie, based on Google’s breakthrough, which it has used to improve its search results, including to make them more relevant. The company has since developed dozens more Ernie models and extended their capabilities to include image and art generation, similar to those of OpenAI’s Dall-E.

Baidu is now using Ernie as the foundation for its chatbot, and is training it on both Chinese- and English-language sources inside and outside China’s firewall, some of the people said. In the past, Baidu has trained Ernie using sources that include Wikipedia, BookCorpus, Reddit and Baidu’s ecosystem of products—such as Baidu Baike and Baidu News—according to its open-source research papers.

Baidu plans to limit its chatbot’s outputs in accordance with the state’s censorship rules, one of the people said. OpenAI also applies restrictions to ChatGPT’s outputs in an effort to avoid toxic hate speech and politically sensitive topics.

Trained on vast amounts of text data from the internet, ChatGPT is capable of answering all manner of user questions in fluent conversational prose. But the chatbot can’t guarantee accurate answers and at times has delivered sexist or racist comments, industry researchers have said.

Tech giants including Microsoft Corp. and Google are hurrying to mature the technology underlying ChatGPT and integrate it into their products—including search, where its conversational abilities are seen to have the most potential to upend the status quo.

Microsoft, which invested in OpenAI in 2019 and 2021, announced fresh backing—as much as $10 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported—to infuse ChatGPT into its product lines, including its search engine Bing.

A similar Google technology known as LaMDA made its debut in 2021, and Meta Platforms Inc. released a chatbot known as Blenderbot in 2020, but neither has revealed plans to integrate the technology into their platforms.