During March, the Beijing-based search provider debuted Ernie Bot which seems to be China’s first major riposte to ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI which has already taken the internet by storm.
China’s First Major Riposte To ChatGPT
This new launch has sparked a race by domestic tech firms including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. to unveil rival platforms.
On Tuesday, Baidu Inc. ‘s ChatGPT-style service has outperformed OpenAI’s seminal product on several measures, said China’s search leader while talking about the Bot.
So far, the Ernie 3.5, the latest iteration of Baidu’s foundation model, has surpassed OpenAI’s chatbot built on GPT-3.5 in general abilities.
It has outperformed the more advanced GPT-4 on several Chinese-language capabilities, the company stated in a statement citing a test by the state newspaper China Science Daily, based on datasets including AGIEval and C-Eval, benchmarks designed for evaluating such AI models.
What To Expect?
This new model from Baidu also boosts its training and inference efficiency hence making it faster and cheaper to iterate and upgrade to future versions.
With this launch, Baidu hopes that Ernie Bot built atop its years of investment, research and development in AI technology.
It is expected to become the next must-have app in the world’s largest internet arena, luring users back from all-in-one platforms like Tencent’s WeChat.
In the meantime, the company is integrating Ernie Bot across multiple business lines, ranging from cloud computing to smart speakers.
For this venture, Baidu has set aside a $140 million venture fund to invest in OpenAI-like startups.
When it comes to the country’s policy, Chinese regulators have said that any generative AI services would need their approval before being rolled out in the country.
Meanwhile, US sanctions have deprived Chinese tech firms of the best chips to train their AI models, making improvements in efficiency all the more critical.
During an audience of Chinese government officials and fellow internet executives in an event Monday, Baidu’s billionaire founder Robin Li said,“Foundation models are an engine driving global economic growth and represent a major strategic opportunity that cannot be missed.”
