This will not be a copy of ChatGPT. Baidu has reportedly invested billions of dollars in its Ernie system, a large-scale AI model that the company has been developing for several years now. This will serve as the foundation of the company's platform.

Amusingly Bloomberg reports that ERNIE has garnered appreciation in the NLP community for outperforming Google‘s BERT in various Chinese language tasks.

 The Chinese outfit had been seeing search growth slumping for a while now and saw AI based chatbots as a potential way to leapfrog rivals.