Robin Li, CEO and co-founder of Baidu, was clear that the company had to come up with something. Whatever. This is how Ernie, the Chinese search giant’s artificial intelligence-based chatbot, has been launched. As indicated in Reuters, Li himself admitted the rush and indicated that they were presenting it today “because the market demands it.” ChatGPT’s theoretically great Asian competitor is apparently a more limited platform with a very clear target audience: China.
Ernie. This conversational artificial intelligence model is based on ERNIE 3.0 and PLATO, two pre-trained language models that follow in the footsteps of others such as GPT. According to Louise Matsakis, an editor at Semafor who attended the presentation, Li noted that Ernie is focused on the Chinese market and has “a greater ability to understand Chinese language” than other language models. In other words, if you want a chatbot that works well in Chinese, Baidu says it has the best.
I’m watching @baidu‘s demo of its competitor to ChatGPT, ERNIE Bot. First, CEO Robin Li asked ERNIE about The Three-Body Problem pic.twitter.com/oeN9PZQJ71
— Louise Matsakis (@lmatsakis) March 16, 2023
Decaffeinated presentation. Investors were disappointed with a presentation that turned out to be a sequence of short videos showing off some of Ernie’s capabilities. Examples included how Ernie could perform mathematical calculations, how he was able to converse in various dialects of Chinese, and how he could generate images and even video from text prompts.
ERNIE Bot is a versatile model that can generate text, images, audio, dialect speech, and video.#Baidu #ERNIEBot #AI #generativeAI pic.twitter.com/NUX4MhBvkz
— Baidu Inc. (@Baidu_Inc) March 16, 2023
very limited release. Only a small group of users will have initial access to Ernie. They will receive a series of invitation codes starting today, while companies interested in integrating these capabilities into their businesses can begin requesting access. The chatbot will be integrated into various Baidu products and can generate text, images and video, but the ability to generate video It wont be available for everyone.
The training data of Baidu’s ERNIE Bot includes trillions of web pages, billions of search and image data, billions of speech calls, and a knowledge graph of 550 billion facts, enabling Baidu to hold a unique position in Chinese language processing. #ERNIEBot pic.twitter.com/NK1RpqEGGG
— Baidu Inc. (@Baidu_Inc) March 16, 2023
stock market crash. That the presentation was not interactive and that only those videos were shown has caused many doubts among investors, and during the presentation Baidu shares fell 10% on the Hong Kong stock market, although they later recovered some ground to fall 6.4%. The lack of a clear mass availability date for Ernie has also left the feeling one of disappointment and uncertainty about his true ability to compete with ChatGPT or GPT-4.
The rush is not good counselors. The launch seems rushed, and in fact Li himself warned that the chatbot was not perfect “so why are we announcing it today? Because the market demands it.” Analysts such as Charlie Chai of 86Research were still hopeful for Baidu: “We continue to advise investors to hold Baidu shares as the ‘national grand champion’ of the AI space in China,” he explained.
Image: Baidu
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