(Bloomberg) -- Baidu Inc. surged more than 13% after affirming it's on track to publicly roll out its ChatGPT-like service in March, stoking anticipation around potentially China's most prominent entry in the race to create lifelike AI bots.
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Its shares gained the most in about three months after the company said it was naming the service "Wenxin Yiyan," or "Ernie Bot" in English. Baidu should complete internal testing in time for next month's launch, it said in a statement.
China's largest search engine company plans to initially embed Ernie into its main search services. The tool will allow users to get conversation-style search results much like OpenAI's popular platform.
Baidu has spent billions of dollars researching AI in a years-long effort to transition from online marketing to deeper technology. Its Ernie system - a large-scale machine-learning model that's been trained on data over several years - will be the foundation of its upcoming ChatGPT-like tool.
Read more: Chinese Search Giant Baidu to Launch ChatGPT-Style Bot
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