August 3, 2023 - Great Wall Motor, China’s largest sport-utility vehicle (SUV) assembler, looks set to become the first carmaker to use Baidu’s ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which enables conversation between driver and car.
The company, based in Baoding in northern China’s Hebei province, said in a statement on Wednesday that it has partnered with Baidu, a search and AI giant, to develop vehicles fitted with the chatbot tool known as Ernie Bot, reinforcing a push to make cars more intelligent and user-friendly.
“Several innovative features have been tested in those vehicles that are being mass produced,” the statement said. “They will be gradually put into commercial use on a wide basis.”
Great Wall did not reveal which models will be the first to feature built-in Ernie Bot, China’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a so-called large language model. Neither did it unveil a time frame for launching its first vehicle fitted with the conversational technology.
“Great Wall is taking a step closer to churning out vehicles with Ernie Bot built in because it has completed the tests,” said Cao Hua, a partner at the Shanghai private-equity firm Unity Asset Management, which counts AI among its investments.
“A tie-up between carmakers and [the] AI technology firm will expand the use of the chatbot tool.”
Beijing-based Baidu said in another statement that other car brands including Lynk and Smart also plan to build cars fitted with the technology.
In February, the technology behemoth said its electric vehicle (EV) subsidiary Jidu Auto will use Ernie Bot in its cars.
Jidu has yet to mass produce a car and plans to launch its first production model late in 2023.
Aside from conversation, Ernie Bot also provides services such as journey planning, in-car entertainment and generating images based on text inputs.
EVs featuring autonomous driving technology and digital cockpits are increasingly sought after by young motorists in China.
Electric car sales in the mainland will rise by 35 per cent this year to 8.8 million units, UBS analyst Paul Gong predicted in April.
Tesla is now the runaway leader in the country’s premium EV segment, trailed by three Chinese start-ups – Li Auto, Nio and Xpeng.
The premium electric car builders are competing against each other to make their products more autonomous and cutting-edge in terms of their in-car entertainment.
Guangzhou-based Xpeng has received approval to roll out its advanced driver assistance systems for commercial use on a trial basis.
Some of its cars, fitted with its X NGP (Navigation Guided Pilot) software, are now capable of autonomous driving in China’s top four cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
Some cars built by Shanghai-based Nio, are fitted with PanoCinema, a panoramic and immersive digital cockpit boasting augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies.
On June 27, Baidu, citing a test carried out by state-run newspaper China Science Daily, said its Ernie 3.5, the company’s latest large language model, had surpassed ChatGPT 3.5 in comprehensive ability tests and outperformed the more advanced ChatGPT 4 in several Chinese-language capabilities.
Baidu has pushed to integrate Ernie Bot into other products, such as its cloud services, and announced a 1 billion yuan (US$139.3 million) venture fund to invest in Chinese generative AI start-ups in May.
