Tech giant Baidu made China's first artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot fully publicly available on Thursday, with two other companies, Baichuan and Zhipu AI, following suit in putting their bots online for general use.

China's AI developers are seeking to compete with Western rivals such as Microsoft and OPEN AI, the maker of ChatGPT.

The move comes despite government regulations that impose a tight control on certain information, such as that surrounding the deadly 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.

According to guidelines issued this month by Beijing, Chinese generative AI apps must "adhere to the core values of socialism" and refrain from threatening national security.

US-based OPEN AI's ChatGPT is banned in China.

What did Baidu say about its ERNIE chatbot?

"We are thrilled to share that ERNIE Bot is now fully open to the general public starting August 31," Baidu said in a statement.

"In addition to ERNIE Bot, Baidu is set to launch a suite of new AI-native apps that allow users to fully experience the four core abilities of generative AI: understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory," the statement added.

CEO Robin Li was quoted in the statement as saying that the rollout would enable Baidu to gather "massive" feedback from the wide interaction with humans, enabling it to quickly improve the app.

Generative AI apps, of which ERNIE is one, use huge amounts of data taken both from the internet and from the humans that use them to learn to respond to questions in human-like language.  

The ERNIE rollout led to Baidu shares going up 3.2% in Hong Kong on Thursday.

tj/rt (AP, AFP)