Baidu - the largest search engine and Internet company in China - announced the launch of a new fund for investing in startups, working in the field of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. The fund was named Baidu AI Ventures and will be managed by Baidu Ventures.
The main goal of the fund is to find and support promising projects, who can apply Baidu technology in various fields, such as education, healthcare, e-commerce and entertainment. One of these projects is ChatGPT, platform for creating dialogue systems based on generative models.
ChatGPT is a startup, based in 2021 graduates of Tsinghua University. He develops solutions to automate communication with customers, user support, marketing and other scenarios. ChatGPT uses pre-trained models based on the GPT-3 architecture, that adapt to specific tasks and domains. The startup has already attracted the attention of such large companies, like Alibaba, Tencent и Huawei.
KEY POINTS:
- Baidu plans to allocate $140 million to support startups, like ChatGPT, within three years. The company hopes, that such an initiative will help accelerate the development of the artificial intelligence industry in China and the world.
- Baidu, Inc (NASDAQ: START ) singled out 1 billion yuan (140 million dollars) to finance Chinese startups, who research generative AI, marking the rush, to enable the ChatGPT frenzy .
- According to Bloomberg, the company proposes to use the pool for project incubation, based on her artificial intelligence model Ernie, with deployment up to 10 million yuan per item .
- Baidu and its venture capital partners will explore proposals from potential founders, who will use Ernie to create their services.
- Analog Baidu ChatGPT Ernie Bot provoked a race between Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (NYSE: BABA ) и Tencent Holdings Ltd (OTC: Czech Republic ) и SenseTime Group Inc (OTC: SNTMF ) for the launch of competing platforms .
- Nevertheless, ChatGPT madness also comes with its own problems. China's top internet regulator said, that it will need to validate the security of the generative AI tools before implementation.
- Besides, The US embargo on semiconductor manufacturing has deprived Chinese tech firms of the best chips to train their AI models, which can widen the gap between such services, as Ernie Bot, and their Western counterparts.
- Lee launched Ernie Bot in March, using a pre-recorded demo, to the dismay of investors and analysts, wanting more lively interaction.
