Baidu on Wednesday announced that it will launch its generative artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot, Ernie Bot, to the general public starting August 31, making it the first Chinese company to do so.

Earlier today, Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the matter, reported that several Chinese companies, including Baidu, had received approval from authorities to launch services similar to ChatGPT.

Encouraged by ChatGPT's state-of-the-art language processing and reasoning capabilities, Chinese tech companies are racing to develop their own large language models (LLMs) and chatbots.

With years of investment in AI, Baidu is leading the race and launched Ernie Bot in March. 

Other tech firms are also investing heavily in generative AI. Alibaba has developed its own LLM Tongyi, Huaiwei launched Pangu, and Tencent has released Hunyuan.

However, all of these chatbot services were only open to a limited user base, such as enterprise clients, selected users, and media. This is because they are required to obtain a license from China's top cyberspace watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), before they can operate to the general public.

If a generative AI service provider finds “illegal” content, it should take measures to stop generating that content, improve the algorithm and then report that material to the relevant authority, the CAC said.

The search engine is integrating Ernie Bot into everything from cloud computing to smart speakers, hoping the new technology will give those businesses a big boost.