BEIJING, Feb 7 Reuters China39;s Baidu Inc said on Tuesday it would complete internal testing of a ChatGPTstyle project called Ernie Bot in March, joining a global race as interest in generative artificial intelligence AI gathers steam.

Erniemeaning Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, is a large AIpowered language model introduced in 2019, Baidu said. It has gradually grown to be able to perform tasks including language understanding, language generation, and texttoimage generation, it added.

Search engine giant Baidu39;s Hong Konglisted shares jumped as much as 13.4 on the news.

A person familiar with the matter told Reuters last week that Baidu was planning to launch such a service in March. The person said Baidu aims to make the service available as a standalone application and gradually merge it into its search engine by incorporating chatbotgenerated results when users make search requests.

Generative artificial intelligence, technology that can create prose or other content on command and free up whitecollar workers39; time, has been gathering significant venture capital investment and interest from tech firms, especially in Silicon Valley.

Defining the category is ChatGPT, a chatbot from Microsoftbacked OpenAI that has been the centre of much buzz since it was released in November. ChatGPT is not available in China but some users have found workarounds to access the service.

Microsoft Corp has a 1 billion investment in San Franciscobased…