Chinese search engine big Baidu on Thursday unveiled its much-anticipated synthetic intelligence-powered chatbot referred to as Ernie Bot, giving the world a glimpse of what could possibly be China’s strongest rival to US analysis lab OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The recognition of ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft, has triggered a frenzied rush amongst Chinese tech giants and startups alike to develop a rival. Baidu jumped to the forefront of the race after saying early final month it was near finishing a chatbot utilizing its AI-driven deep studying mannequin, Ernie – brief for “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration”.
The Ernie Bot introduction, in a presentation at Baidu headquarters in Beijing, comes two days after Alphabet’s Google unveiled a flurry of AI instruments for its electronic mail, collaboration and cloud software program. Microsoft is anticipated to make an analogous announcement to Google afterward Thursday.
“For sure we cannot say that it’s perfect,” mentioned Baidu CEO Robin Li, presenting Ernie Bot. “So why are we unveiling it today? Because the market demands it.”
But the restricted presentation of Ernie Bot, restricted to temporary, pre-recorded movies, did not match market hopes and Baidu’s Hong Kong-listed shares within the agency tumbled as a lot as 10 p.c earlier than clawing again some floor.
During the presentation, Li confirmed 5 movies of Ernie Bot answering questions on well-liked Chinese science fiction novel “The Three Body Problem”, finishing up mathematical calculations, understanding Chinese dialects, and producing a video and picture with textual content prompts.
“Today’s announcement is a natural continuation of the hard work we have put in over the past many years,” he mentioned on the occasion, which was additionally dwell streamed throughout 9 platforms, together with Twitter, Youtube, and Weibo. Twitter and Youtube are blocked in China.
Starting Thursday, Ernie Bot will likely be open to an preliminary group of customers with invitation codes, and firms can apply to embed the bot into their merchandise by way of Baidu’s cloud platform.
Baidu has touted its a few years of heavy R&D funding in synthetic intelligence and deep studying as one motive it’s best positioned to guide the race to develop a Chinese reply to ChatGPT. Baidu’s analysis and growth bills in 2022 had been CNY 21.4 billion (roughly Rs. 25,630 crore), accounting for 22 p.c of income.
Baidu plans to make use of Ernie Bot to revolutionise its search engine, by far probably the most dominant in China, in addition to use it to extend effectivity in cloud, sensible vehicles, and family home equipment, amongst different mainstream companies.
Earlier this week, OpenAI on Tuesday mentioned it’s starting to launch a strong synthetic intelligence mannequin referred to as GPT-4, describing it as “multimodel”, which means photos in addition to textual content prompts can spur it to generate content material.
Li nodded to GPT-4 throughout his speech, saying that its coming confirmed the edge for this form of expertise was very excessive, and that it stunned him with its capacity to summarise info.
But he additionally cautioned towards seeing this by way of the lens of geopolitics. “Ernie Bot is not a tool of confrontation between China and the US,” he mentioned.
To date, 650 firms have mentioned they’ll be a part of the Ernie ecosystem, he added. Chinese state media shops and a Shaolin temple had been among the many first sign-ups to change into Ernie Bot companions.
© Thomson Reuters 2023
