Mashable: Baidu has more than 600 million active users each month, making it the most popular search engine in China.

Following Google, China's leading search engine company Baidu is apparently working on an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot equivalent to OpenAI's ChatGPT and may unveil it in March, according to a report on Monday.

According to the report, Baidu plans to launch the AI chatbot as a standalone app before incorporating it into the search engine's overall infrastructure, this means that users may soon be able to obtain search results formatted in a conversational manner, similar to what is now available on ChatGPT. Baidu has more than 600 million active users each month, making it the most popular search engine in China.

A large-scale AI model that Baidu has been working on for a number of years is called "Ernie," and the company is rumored to have spent billions of dollars on it. This is going to be the basis for the company's ChatGPT-like platform.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven natural language processing tool with the ability to have natural conversations when given input. The program may help with things like content generation and code creation as well as answer inquiries. More than a million people have signed up for the program since it debuted in November of last year.

It was reported earlier this month that Microsoft was considering adding ChatGPT to its Bing search engine in order to boost its performance. Reportedly, the firm has lately put $10 billion into OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT.

According to an earlier report, search engine giant Google has declared a "code red," the equivalent of pulling the fire alarm, in response to the emergence of ChatGPT. Twenty or so artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, including a Google Search driven by AI, are slated for release this year.