Chinese search engine giant Baidu on Tuesday said it was developing an AI-powered chatbot as tech giants rush to match the success of ChatGPT, a hugely popular language app that has sparked a gold rush in artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

Baidu's ChatGPT-style chatbot is set to be called ERNIE Bot, which is now under internal testing and is likely to complete in March.

The chatbot is expected to be integrated into the company's main search service, allowing users to get a conversation-style reply to their search results instead of getting a list of links – similar to the experience of using ChatGPT.

Baidu has diversified into AI, cloud computing and autonomous driving technologies in recent years. It unveiled its key AI-generated content technologies at the developer conference last year with three AI-powered "creators" featuring versatile content creation skills introduced.

Google's ChatGPT rival named Bard

Google said Monday it will release a conversational chatbot named Bard.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in his blog on Monday that the Bard conversational AI was to go out for testing with a plan to make it more widely available "in the coming weeks."

Google's Bard is based on LaMDA, the firm's Language Model for Dialogue Applications system, and has been in development for several years.

"Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models," Pichai said.

"It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses," he added, hinting that the app would give up-to-date responses, something ChatGPT is unable to do.

Pichai said responses churned out by Bard would "meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information."

Crucially for its looming duel with Microsoft, Google also said that users would soon see AI-powered features in its search engine.

New-style responses would "distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats," Pichai said.

Controversial game changer

ChatGPT, created by San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems or programming code on demand within seconds, sparking widespread fears of cheating or of entire professions becoming obsolete.

"Generative AI is a game changer, and much like the rise of the internet sank the networking giants that came before (AOL, CompuServe, etc.), it has the potential to change the competitive dynamic for search and information," said independent tech analyst Rob Enderle.

However, researchers using the same language models as Bard or ChatGPT have demonstrated the technology's ability to spew out misinformation or nonsense on a potentially massive scale.

Facebook owner Meta in November was forced to take down the release of its own large language model called Galactica after three days when users shared its biased and incorrect results on social media within hours of its release.

Search engines beefed up by generative AI "will give structured answers to questions and no longer links," Thierry Poibeau of the CNRS research center in Paris told AFP.

But bots like ChatGPT "also give wrong answers, which is annoying for a search engine," said Poibeau.

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