Asia Tech Wire (Sep 9) -- An executive at Chinese Internet giant Baidu has denied rumors that the company is abandoning the universal large model behind its artificial intelligence chatbot Ernie Bot.

In response to the recent online news that the universal large model behind Ernie Bot has been abandoned, Zhang Quanwen, head of marketing department for Ernie Bot, posted in WeChat circle of friends, "The so-called 'abandonment of the universal large model research and development' is purely a rumor! "

"Ernie Bot has just completed a comprehensive upgrade of its functions. We will continue to increase our R&D investment in the field of general-purpose large models," he said.

Ernie Bot's capability upgrades include more in-depth and professional creation of content, more comprehensive and rich Q&A effects, support for simultaneous processing of hundreds of files in multiple formats, one-key correlation to read documents on a network disk, intelligent translation and picture comprehension, and so on.