Baidu's entry into ChatGPT Robin Li: Related technologies have reached a critical point

"Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" on January 30 (Reporter Huang Xinyi) There is market news that Baidu is planning to launch an artificial intelligence chatbot service similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT in March this year, and the initial version will be embedded in its search service. This tool will allow users to get conversational search results whose names have not yet been determined.

The reporter of the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" exclusively confirmed from people familiar with the matter that Baidu has plans to launch a chatGPT-like chatbot internally, but the specific time is not accurate. Baidu CEO Robin Li positioned the project as "leading the generational transformation of the search experience."

According to the person familiar with the matter, Li Yanhong pointed out internally that the relevant technology has reached a critical point, and Baidu has a greater opportunity in it.

"It's grand and exciting. But we think it's achievable because the technology has reached a tipping point. Technologies like ChatGPT are hot, and how they can be used in search scenarios is harder to explore than the technology itself. How can this be done so that hundreds of millions of people benefit every day and make their efficiency significantly improved? In the year ahead, we have a very good opportunity in this regard. Li Yanhong said.

A number of industry insiders pointed out that ChatGPT is still in the testing stage and will not have an impact on traditional information retrieval tools in the short term. But if the content quality and training cost of ChatGPT are expected to improve further in the future, search engines will usher in a technological revolution. And Google, Baidu, Sogou, 360, etc. will be the first to be impacted. This is an important reason why Baidu is actively entering the market.

▍ChatGPT may destroy the entrance position of search engines

Judging from the test results of many netizens, ChatGPT can not only recognize English, but also has a high understanding of Chinese. Some answers are even more "reliable" than those obtained by search engines. This has contributed to the popularity of ChatGPT in China.

Morgan Stanley said in a December 2022 research report that language models could take market share and that ChatGPT could undermine Google's position as an entry point for internet users.

Among foreign manufacturers, Microsoft has expressed a positive embrace of ChatGPT and AIGC (generative artificial intelligence) technology. According to media reports, Microsoft plans to invest $10 billion in OpenAI to acquire a 49% stake, and the two sides are currently in talks and are expected to reach a post-investment valuation of OpenAI of $29 billion.

Microsoft CEO Nadella said in January that he plans to integrate artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT into Bing search engine, Office Family Bucket (including Word, PPT, Excel, etc.), Azure cloud services, Teams chat programs and other products. It was also previously reported that Microsoft plans to launch a Bing Search version with ChatGPT by the end of March 2023 to better combat Google search. This may have been one of the incentives that spurred Baidu to accelerate the launch of related plans.

An IT insider told the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter that ChatGPT will change the way search engines are used, so he is very much looking forward to the emergence of the Chinese version of ChatGPT.

"Search engines are typical tool-based products, and when better tools appear, users will naturally change them. If ChatGPT can provide users with sufficiently accurate content, traditional search engines will naturally be abandoned. ”

CSC believes that the natural language model represented by ChatGPT will be deeply integrated into the fields of content generation, search engine enhancement, programming assistance, intelligent customer service, etc., and become an important auxiliary tool for people's daily life production. At the same time, the rapid commercial landing of ChatGPT will also drive the development of the AI chip industry chain and the data industry chain.

Guohai Securities pointed out that with the continuous optimization of ChatGPT, it is expected to be applied in many fields such as medical treatment, customer service robots, virtual humans, translation, marketing, games, social networking, education, family escort, etc., and potential business models include cloud services, content marketing, data monetization, consulting services, copyright licensing, etc.

▍Still in the testing stage, it will not constitute an impact in the short term

Of course, many analysts pointed out that the current ChatGPT can not replace the traditional search engine.

"From the test situation, the probability of error in the content of the answer is still quite high, and the robot often says some wrong things with confidence." A user who uses ChatGPT for an astronomical knowledge test said.

Galaxy Securities believes that ChatGPT is not the same as the functions and advantages of traditional search engines. Search engine is an information retrieval system, which can return the results of multiple queries with high accuracy, and the search engine will not make a judgment on the information, and the results are fully rendered waiting for the user's filtering.

ChatGPT is a natural language processing model that receives input instructions from users, matches and outputs a corresponding single result. Because the trained model filters the results, only a single result is returned to ensure the smoothness of the conversation with the user.

In terms of application fields, the information base of search engines crawls information quickly, the information base is more frequent and the stock is large, and it is often used in literature retrieval, Internet search and other fields. The corpus of ChatGPT comes from offline data, and the output text may have false information, and absorbing new knowledge requires retraining and fine-tuning of the model, which will lead to an increase in training costs and screening costs, so it is mainly used in natural language interaction fields with strong logic such as human-computer dialogue, intelligent customer service, and intelligent question and answer.

In addition, ChatGPT is still in the testing stage, and will not impact existing industries, especially traditional information retrieval tools, in the short term, and does not have the ability to replace some industries. However, if the problem of content quality and training cost of ChatGPT can be solved in the future, perhaps in the long run, search engines will usher in a technological revolution, forming a more friendly interactive interface and content generation, and will also squeeze some industries with strong mechanical repetition.

A person close to Baidu told the "Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily" reporter that at present, the application of ChatGPT in search engines is still difficult to achieve, and the follow-up still depends on Baidu's investment in its research and development.