(Bloomberg) — Baidu Inc. rose more than 15% after saying it is on track to publicly launch its ChatGPT-like service in March, stoking anticipation around China’s potentially biggest entry in the race to create realistic artificial intelligence bots.
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Its shares posted their biggest gain in about eight months after the company said it would name the service “Wenxin Yiyan” or “Ernie Bot” in English. Baidu should complete internal tests in time for next month’s launch, he said in a statement.
Read more: Google launches ChatGPT Rival ‘Bard’ for early testers
News of Baidu’s foray into the red-hot generative AI arena has sent AI-related Chinese stocks skyrocketing from Beijing Deep Glint Technology Co. to Cloudwalk Technology Co. in recent days. The mania reflects growing investor interest since OpenAI’s ChatGPT debuted, attracting surprising investment from the likes of Microsoft Corp. Beyond Baidu, a growing number of companies large and small are racing to try to outpace the startup in the suddenly hot world of AI. services.
China’s largest search engine company plans to initially integrate Ernie into its core search services. The tool will allow users to get conversational style search results much like the popular OpenAI platform.
Baidu has spent billions of dollars on AI research in a multi-year effort to transition online marketing to deeper technology. His Ernie system, a large-scale machine learning model that has been trained on data for several years, will be the basis of his next ChatGPT-like tool.
Read more: Chinese search giant Baidu to launch ChatGPT-style bot
AI is a rare bright spot in a shrinking tech industry that is shedding jobs. Generative artificial intelligence companies, named for their ability to generate new content from digital treasure troves of text, photos and art, are attracting large sums of venture capital dollars. In 2022, they grossed about $920 million in the US, according to PitchBook data, up 35% from the previous year.
In January, Microsoft agreed to invest $10 billion in OpenAI, one of the largest startup investments in history. Additionally, with less than three months to go until 2023, various generative AI companies have raised or are in talks to raise more than $700 million cumulatively, according to funding round reports. An updated list maintained by the Homebrew AI Club, a group meant to be a meeting place for AI workers, counts more than 150 startups in the sector.
Read more: OpenAI is drawing competition from the fleet of startups
The ChatGPT theme has also taken global stock markets by storm, increasing shares of all things AI. Investors in Chinese stocks have embraced the theme since the Lunar New Year holiday, even as the recent reopening-fueled recovery in the broader market began to falter last week.
However, strong gains in some stocks have started to show signs of stress, despite the good news from Baidu. Deep Glint Technology fell as much as 10% on Tuesday, cutting its rise for the year to 82%, while Guangdong TianYiMa Information Industry Co. fell as much as 7.2%.
“The market likes to speculate on unlikely things like this, especially when new funds are lacking,” said Wu Wei, a fund manager at Beijing Win Integrity Investment Management Co. “When it’s just existing funds that rotate within sectors, these trades are meant to go as fast as they came, leaving retail investors to pocket the losses.”
–With the assistance of Vlad Savov, Jeanny Yu and April Ma.
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