China's 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, which can 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.

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

Following Baidu, ten other Chinese companies reportedly obtained approvals for releasing their AI language models to the public from the same day, including ByteDance, SenseTime Group and Baichuan AI.

"Overall, the development of China's AI sector has witnessed progress at an unprecedented speed so far this year," Liu Dingding, an independent tech analyst, was quoted as saying by Global Times on Thursday.

Liu said Chinese AI language models are running neck-and-neck with those developed in the U.S., with China even leading the U.S in applications driven by the country's 5G mobile internet and other digital infrastructure.

With the rapid development, China has also released relevant documents on generative AI, both encouraging its innovation and promoting regulation.

On August 15, the country's interim regulation on the management of generative AI services went into effect.

First released in July, the regulation introduces a range of measures to enhance generative AI technology while establishing basic norms for providers of generative AI services.

It is aimed at promoting the sound development of generative AI and its standard applications, safeguarding national security and social public interests, and protecting the legitimate rights and interests of citizens, legal entities and organizations, according to the Cyberspace Administration of China.

(With input from Xinhua)