BEIJING Chinese search engine giant Baidu's CEO Robin Li said on Friday that the company will "very soon" officially launch Ernie 3.5, a generative AI large-language model that will power Baidu's ChatGPT-like app Ernie Bot and upgrade its search engine.

Li made the announcement at the Zhongguancun Forum, one of China's most well-known techology forums, around two months after Ernie Bot was first shown to the public to mixed reviews.

Since then, Ernie Bot and other products powered by the company's generative AI large-language model have remained in trial mode, with a select number of companies and users invited to test the products and provide feedback.

(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman)