WSJ: Baidu’s ChatGPT competitor not ready a week before planned launch
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The ERNIE neural network from the Chinese Internet giant Baidu, which is designed to compete with the sensational ChatGPT of the American company OpenAI, is still not ready, although its launch is scheduled for March 16. This is with reference to the employees of the Chinese company reports The Wall Street Journal.
According to the publication, now the company is doing everything possible to have time to set up the work of the neural network on time. So, hundreds of Baidu employees are forced to work from morning to night, the publication claims. In addition, Baidu asked teams working on other projects to share with the ERNIE developers both specialists and advanced equipment that is not enough to support the operation of the neural network. Right now, the neural network is still undergoing training on data sets, and according to some employees, the product is unlikely to be “good enough” by March 16th.
Baidu said last month that it intends to embed ERNIE into its search engine and provide access to the chatbot in March. Now, the company’s employees say that the product will be introduced in stages and at first only a very limited circle of users will get access to it.
As noted by the WSJ, the launch of ERNIE is of great importance for the company. The neural network project was supported from the very beginning by the Beijing City Hall, where Baidu is headquartered. In addition, a failed launch or performance problems with ERNIE could result in serious financial losses for Baidu, as was the case with Google and its Bard chatbot: after it returned a search result with a factual error during the presentation, Alphabet shares (parent Google) collapsed by almost 8%, and the company’s market capitalization decreased by about $100 billion.
In early February, several of the world’s leading technology corporations at once announced plans to integrate the ChatGPT chatbot into their products or the imminent launch of their competitors of this program. This has already been reported by Google, Microsoft, Baidu and Opera.
Read more about the series of launches of chatbots in the publication “Kommersant” “Word generator hypnotized millions”.
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