Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU, HKEX: 9888) is a Chinese technology company best known internationally for its search engine and, in the generative-AI era, for ERNIE Bot. On March 16, 2023, Baidu unveiled ERNIE Bot at a Beijing event, with Co-founder, Chairman and CEO Robin Li (Li Yanhong) presenting. In its own press release, Baidu described ERNIE Bot as a generative-AI product that can “comprehend human intentions and deliver accurate, logical, and fluent responses approaching human level.”
Baidu said ERNIE Bot was built on its existing ERNIE and PLATO models and trained using methods including “Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, Prompt Learning, Knowledge Enhancement, Retrieval Augmentation, and Dialogue Augmentation.” It launched on an invitation basis, and Baidu reported that within two hours of the press conference “more than 30,000 enterprise users have applied for access to the API.”
Why business readers should care: ERNIE Bot was China’s first major public response to ChatGPT, launched roughly three months after ChatGPT’s debut. Baidu’s move signaled that the generative-AI race would be global and that Chinese technology firms intended to field domestic frontier-style models rather than rely on Western providers.
(Sourcing note: Baidu’s English-language research blog was unavailable at verification time; the Tier 1 primary used here is the corporate press release issued by Baidu, Inc. itself.)