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OpenAI’s stranglehold on conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) might soon be a thing of the past, as competition is on the way.

Over the weekend, both Google and Baidu announced they are diving in headfirst on the Artificial General Intelligence space, joining OpenAI in building a new, transformative breed of AI capable of generating text outputs, answering questions, coding program languages and even completing the pixels of images based on the users’ inputs.

OpenAI was obviously the frontrunner, releasing ChatGPT to great success after years of developing and fine-tuning GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which Disruptive Tech Asia previously described as the next big technology after blockchain.

Google has now followed suit, having officially announced the chatbot Bard, built on Lamda, Google’s large language model (LLM), and billed as a rival to ChatGPT. This announcement should not come as a surprise given how Google has been developing its own LLM at around the same time OpenAI was developing GPT-3. Its public launch, however, will come at a later date, as Bard will still be tested first.

Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google, wrote about the announcement in a blog, where he proclaimed that Bard “seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our [Google’s] large language models. He also promised that Google users will soon “see AI-powered features in Search that distil complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web.”

Baidu, the Chinese search engine giant, is not far behind Google in this respect, as it has also announced its own ChatGPT-like chatbot called Wenxin Yiyan (or Ernie Bot in English). Like Bard, Wenxin Yiyan is also still at the testing stage, though the latter is being tested internally at Baidu while the former is being scrutinised by external testers. Wenxin Yiyan’s public launch has not been scheduled as well, but insiders believe it will happen as early as March.

As in Google’s case, Baidu developing a ChatGPT rival is not at all surprising, too, given its AI-related breakthroughs over the past two years. These include the release of several AI innovations in the aerospace and mobility industries back in July of last year, the launch of an AI sign language platform in Baidu AI Cloud last March 2022 and  updates to Baidu Brain 7.0 in August 2021.

The upcoming launch of Bard and Wenxin Yiyan may very well usher AI into a new, more exciting and more transformative frontier. But it remains to be seen whether or not they can replicate the viral success of ChatGPT. Only time will tell.

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