The battle to bring a rival for OpenAI's chatGPT intensifies as China's $Baidu (BIDU.US)$ says its AI-powered service "Ernie Bot's" internal testing will complete in March.

$BIDU-SW (09888.HK)$ rose by as much as 18% in Hong Kong on Tuesday after Baidu confirmed reporting, including from The Wall Street Journal late last month.

What Happened: Baidu is integrating a chatGPT-style application into its primary search service. The company has now revealed that the internal testing for its project Ernie Bot, a chatGPT-style service, will be finished in March, allowing it to join the global race to have the most advanced generative artificial intelligence, reported Reuters.

Ernie stands for "Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration. The AI-powered service is a large language model introduced in 2019 that can now perform tasks like language understanding, language generation and text-to-image generation.

Why It's Important: Baidu plans to make Ernie Bot available as a standalone application. The company will then merge it into its search engine by integrating the chatbot-generated results.

This plan is similar to $Microsoft (MSFT.US)$, which is also working on launching a new version of its search engine, Bing, by incorporating chatGPT's abilities.

Previously it was reported that Alphabet Inc.'s $Alphabet-C (GOOG.US)$ $Alphabet-A (GOOGL.US)$ declared a "code red," and CEO Sundar Pichai tasked the teams to work aggressively on defining the company's AI strategy to deal with the threat posed by chatGPT's overnight popularity.