Zheping Huang, reporting for Bloomberg:
[Baidu Inc.] plans to debut a ChatGPT-style application in March, initially embedding it into its main search services… The tool, whose name hasn’t been decided, will allow users to get conversation-style search results much like OpenAI’s popular platform.
[…]
Baidu has spent billions of dollars researching AI in a years-long effort to transition from online marketing to deeper technology. Its Ernie system — a large-scale machine-learning model that’s been trained on data over several years — will be the foundation of its upcoming ChatGPT-like tool
See also: On censorship of LLM models:
It’s quite hard to restrict the output of general purpose, generative, black box algorithms… Censoring via limiting the training data is hard because algorithms could synthesize an “offensive” output by combining multiple outputs that are ok on their own… Adding an extra filter layer to censor is hard as well Look at all the trouble chatGPT has had with this. Users have repeatedly found ways around the dumb limitations on certain topics.
I don’t think censoring the output of a language model is impossible but it is a fundamentally different problem than China has previously faced with its “Great Firewall.” It will be fascinating to see how Baidu’s engineers end up approaching it and whether this will ultimately impede the growth of these technolgies in China.