Chinese tech giant Baidu on Tuesday revealed its ChatGPT-style chatbot and will complete its beta testing in March, with China’s other major tech companies Alibaba and NetEase also developing similar projects.Fast factsBaidu’s ChatGPT rival “Ernie Bot” is undergoing closed beta testing and will be embedded into Baidu’s search engine, according to a local news report. Baidu did not disclose a launch date.Following the company’s Ernie Bot announcement, Baidu’s U.S. shares closed at US$160.22 on Tuesday – the highest since March 2022 – and closed at US$152.34 on Wednesday, according to Yahoo Finance.Fellow Chinese tech giants NetEase and Alibaba are also working on generative AI projects, according to local media reports.Baidu introduced Ernie (Enhanced representation through knowledge integration) in 2019, an AI-powered language model that can understand language by learning from data, laying the foundation for Ernie Bot. Ernie currently ranks fifth on the General Language Understanding Evaluation leaderboard – a global benchmark that evaluates AI’s ability to understand human language.Baidu has also launched multiple AI tools such as Plato for dialogue generation and Ernie-ViLG for text-to-picture generation.ChatGPT, launched by OpenAI in November 2022, has been used by cryptocurrency fans and traders for research, creating trading bots and coding assistance for developers. See related article: JPMorgan report shows institutional trader interest shifting to AI from blockchain after crypto slump