Baidu working on AI chatbot service that will be added to search

First Microsoft Bing. Then Google. Now Baidu is reportedly planning on bringing ChatGPT-style AI to its search results.

Why we care. All the major search engines are seemingly in an arms race to add AI chat to search. Once search engines eventually add the chat features to search, it could have major implications for publishers (websites could see their traffic and visibility impacted, depending on how the AI chat is deployed within the search results) and searchers (will the information be accurate and reliable?). There are a lot of unknown unknowns here, which means search marketers should be watching all these developments.

A standalone app first, then search. Baidu is expected to launch its AI chatbot first as a standalone app (similar to ChatGPT). It would then be gradually merged into Baidu search by March, according to reports.

Baidu is reportedly using its deep learning model called ERNIE (which Baidu described as “a “pre-training language model with 260 billion parameters”) as the chatbot’s foundation and “training it on both Chinese- and English-language sources inside and outside China’s firewall,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Baidu also will limit the outputs of its chatbot to comply with China’s censorship rules.

Dig deeper. There’s more coverage of the news on Techmeme.