"One thing we learned from DeepSeek is that open-sourcing the best models can greatly help adoption," said Baidu's Robin Li.

Chinese search engine group Baidu said on Tuesday that the success of AI company DeepSeek had inspired it to embrace an open source model, under which the source code of its upcoming generative AI chatbot release will be publicly available.

Chinese tech firm Baidu said it would offer access to its flagship artificial intelligence chatbot, Ernie Bot, for free starting April 1. The chatbot, first released just a few months after OpenAI’s ChatGPT,

AI-generated content now appears in 22% of search result pages, with efforts focused on quality and relevance,” Li said during the earnings call.

Chinese search engine giant Baidu said on Friday it would make its next-generation artificial intelligence model Ernie open-source from June 30, a major shift in strategy as competition heats up.

Chinese tech giant Baidu Inc announced on Sunday night that it will integrate DeepSeek's large language model into its search engine and proprietary Ernie model, as part of broader push to diversify users' search experience.

The company, the operator of China’s most popular search engine, announced the plan today. Reuters reported that the initiative centers on an upcoming family of Ernie models dubbed the Ernie 4.5 series. Baidu will start rolling out the LLM series to users in the coming months and plans to open-source its code on June 30.

DeepSeek is spurring competitors at home and abroad to consider an open-source strategy in artificial intelligence (AI) development, following the Chinese start-up's release of powerful low-cost models that upended how large language models (LLMs) are trained.