Chinese Internet giant Baidu is planning to launch an artificial intelligence chatbot tool similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in March, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Baidu plans to debut the application by initially embedding it into its main search services, Bloomberg News reported earlier.

ChatGPT’s tech works by learning from vast amounts of data how to answer any prompt by a user in a human-like way, offering the information like a search engine would or prose like an aspiring novelist.

Microsoft has a $1 billion investment in San Francisco-based OpenAI that it has looked at increasing, Reuters has reported. The company has also worked to add OpenAI’s image-generation software to its Bing search engine in a new challenge to Alphabet Inc’s Google.

Last week, the company announced a further multibillion dollar investment in OpenAI, deepening ties with the startup behind the chatbot sensation ChatGPT and setting the stage for more competition with rival Alphabet Inc’s Google.

Microsoft in a blog post announced “the third phase” of its partnership “through a multiyear, multibillion dollar investment” including additional supercomputer development and cloud-computing support for OpenAI.

Both companies will be able to commercialize the AI tech that results, the blog post said.

A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment on the terms of the latest investment, which some media outlets earlier reported would be $10 billion (roughly Rs. 82,000 crore).

The widely anticipated investment shows how Microsoft is locked in competition with Google, the inventor of key AI research that is planning its own unveil for this spring, a person familiar with the matter previously told Reuters.

Microsoft’s bet came days after it and Alphabet each announced layoffs of 10,000 or more workers. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft warned of a recession and growing scrutiny of digital spend by customers in its layoff announcement.

© Thomson Reuters 2023