SEOUL, South Korea — Last month, China’s Baidu unveiled a chatbot that it claimed was better than ChatGPT, the one developed by Silicon Valley’s OpenAI. ChatGPT was released last fall and set off a fundraising and engineering frenzy in a flourishing field called generative artificial intelligence, a term for technology that can create text or images when prompted by a user.
Baidu, the dominant internet search company in China, became the first major foreign contender in the AI race in March, when it introduced the first version of its chatbot, Ernie. Others followed, opening a new front in the technology rivalry between the United States and China.