Baidu’s good quarter, Fudan launches Chinese ChatGPT, Enterprises want to maintain foreign investment

Baidu reported 2022 revenue of 123.67 billion yuan ($17.99 billion) and net profit of 20.68 billion yuan ($3 billion), a year-on-year increase of 10%. The company’s fourth quarter performance was particularly good, with a net profit of 5.37 billion yuan ($781.35 million), an increase of 32%. The financials benefited from strong performances by Baidu AI Cloud, which held a leading market share of 28.1% in China’s AI cloud services market, and its autonomous driving service Apollo Go, which Baidu claims is the world’s largest autonomous driving service provider with a cumulative 2 million orders.

The prestigious Fudan University has launched a Chinese version of ChatGPT called MOSS, which is the first conversational language model developed in China. A team led by Professor Zhāng Qí 张奇 at the university’s School of Computer Science released MOSS on Monday. It immediately went viral and the school’s server crashed. Baidu’s AI chatbot Ernie Bot will be released in March.

More than 70% of Chinese enterprises intend to maintain or expand their foreign investments in 2023. More than 80% are “relatively” optimistic about the future prospects of foreign investment, according to a survey conducted by the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade (CCPIT). Per Ministry of Commerce data, in 2022, China’s outbound Foreign Direct Investment totalled 985.37 billion yuan ($143.34 billion), a year-on-year increase of 5.2%.