Baidu’s ChatGPT rival Ernie was launched on 16th March, 2023. It stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration.

China has invested heavily in AI, and is in race with other countries such as the US. ChatGPT’s success accelerated Baidu’s rollout. In the rollout, Ernie summarised a science fiction novel and analysed Chinese idiom. The presentation was pre-recorded. It thus became a botched rollout. Yet it has a lot of work to do to catch up with the US. China’s strict censorship rules undermine the quality of data and restrict the development of chatbots. In the development of alogrithms, there are restrictions.

The US has cut off China from high-end computing chips, a key ingredient in technologies such as ChatGPT.