China's Baidu has announced that "Ernie Bot", its rival to ChatGPT, has racked up more than 200 million users, roughly double as many as in December. Baidu CEO Robin Li also said Ernie Bot's application programming interface (API) is being used 200 million times every day, meaning the chatbot was requested by its user to conduct tasks that many times a day. The number of enterprise clients for the chatbot reached 85,000, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen on Tuesday. In February, he told analysts that Baidu was starting to generate revenue from Ernie and in the fourth quarter, the company had earned several hundred million yuan using AI to improve its advertising services and help other companies build their own models. Last March, Ernie Bot was the first locally developed ChatGPT-like chatbot to be announced in China but it only won approval for public release in August, becoming one of the first eight AI chatbots Beijing authorised.

ChatGPT and its brethren are both surprisingly clever and disappointingly dumb. Sure, they can generate pretty poems, solve scientific puzzles, and debug spaghetti code. But we know that they often fabricate, forget, and act like weirdos. Inflection AI, a company founded by researchers who previously worked on major artificial intelligence projects at Google, OpenAI, and Nvidia, built a bot called Pi that seems to make fewer blunders and be more adept at sociable conversation. Inflection designed Pi to address some of the problems of today's chatbots.

Baidu, China's search engine giant, has unveiled its answer to OpenAI's ChatGPT service. It's the latest version of the company's ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration) Bot that it has been developing over the past decade and was first launched back in 2019. In a press event, Baidu CEO Robin Li said this version of ERNIE Bot has capabilities close to GPT-4, the latest iteration of OpenAI's large language model released just a couple of days ago. The chatbot apparently has 550 billion facts in its knowledge graph, but they're mostly focused on the Chinese market. So while it will be able to list Chinese idioms for you, it may not be able to answer as many questions for certain subjects outside the region. ERNIE Bot has the capability to answer a user with audio responses in different Chinese dialects, though, and it can also generate images and videos out of Chinese text.

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has launched its next-generation AI assistant, called Claude. Touted as ChatGPT's rival, Claude reportedly can help with summarization, search, creative and collaborative writing, Q&A, coding and more. Users who participated in a try-out Tuesday reported Claude was an easy-to-communicate-with platform and that it yielded the desired results with fewer efforts. It was designed in a way that it could take direction on personality and tone and yield results accordingly, Anthropic said on its website. Similar to ChatGPT owner OpenAI, Anthropic also has a big tech backing.

Elon Musk could soon join the AI race with an'anti-woke' ChatGPT rival that'would not censor its replies.' People familiar with the matter told The Information that Musk is assembling a team of AI researchers, including Igor Babuschki, who recently left Google's DeepMind AI unit. Babuschkin said he has not officially signed onto the Musk initiative. The project is in'the early stages,' but the goal is to develop'a trustworthy and reliable' chatbot. The move comes as the billionaire has repeatedly criticized OpenAI for placing safeguards on ChatGPT to prevent it from generating offensive dialogue.

In a fair world, technology should be accessible to all and used for humanity's betterment. However, there is a growing concern that AI could be monopolised for vested interests by large corporations. This is why open sourcing is paramount. ChatGPT, the popular chatbot by OpenAI, has been one of the biggest breakthroughs in AI. In just five days since its launch, approximately one million individuals engaged with the bot and it is expected that the number will soon reach the billion mark.

If it seems like everyone is rushing to develop an alternative to ChatGPT, you're not wrong. Chinese online commerce heavyweight Alibaba has confirmed to CNBC that it's working on its equivalent to OpenAI's hit AI chatbot. The company isn't detailing features or offering a release schedule, but says it has been developing generative AI since 2017 and is in the middle of internal testing. The reveal comes as multiple tech giants have introduced rivals to or spinoffs of ChatGPT this week. Google unveiled Bard, while China's Baidu said it was testing "Ernie Bot." Microsoft, meanwhile, launched a redesigned Bing that uses a "much more powerful" language model built with OpenAI's help.

In the face of so much ChatGPT news and buzz, Google announced on Monday its own chatbot AI project, Bard, will be unveiled with more details at Wednesday's Google Presents event in Paris. Bard will serve as an "experimental conversational AI service," according to a blog post by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Monday. It uses Google's existing Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) platform, which the company has been developing for the past two years. However, it won't be open to everyone, like ChatGPT currently is, which ruins the hype a little. Google is starting with a lightweight version of LaMDA, open to a select group of trusted users before scaling up.

ChatGPT, the automated text generation system from OpenAI, has taken the world by storm in the two months since its public beta release but that time alone in the spotlight is quickly coming to an end. Google announced on Monday that its long-rumored chatbot AI project is in fact real and very much on the way. It's called Bard and we expect to hear a lot more about it during Wednesday's "Google Presents" event from Paris. Bard will serve as an "experimental conversational AI service," per a blog post by Google CEO Sundar Pichai Monday. It's built atop Google's existing Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) platform, which the company has been developing for the past two years.

Chinese web giant Baidu is preparing to launch a powerful ChatGPT rival in March. Baidu is often called the "Google of China" because it offers similar services, including search, maps, email, ads, cloud storage, and more. Baidu, like Google, also invests heavily in AI and machine learning. Earlier this month, AI News reported that Google was changing its AI review processes to speed up the release of new solutions. One of the first products to be released under Google's new process is set to be a ChatGPT rival, due to be announced during the company's I/O developer conference in May.