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Baidu says AI chatbot Ernie now matches OpenAI’s GPT-4, unveils new enterprise tools
- CEO Robin Li showed off the capabilities of Ernie Bot 4 at the Baidu World 2023 conference in Beijing on Tuesday
- Baidu previously claimed its bot already surpassed ChatGPT in some Chinese-language tasks and has been baking it into search, maps and other products
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Che Panin Beijing
Chinese internet search giant Baidu has unveiled an updated version of its ChatGPT-like Ernie Bot with a claim that it is as powerful as OpenAI’s GPT-4, as the technology firm demonstrates its ambition in generative artificial intelligence (AI).
The company’s co-founder and CEO Robin Li Yanhong demoed Ernie Bot 4 on Tuesday at the Baidu World 2023 conference in Beijing. The billionaire showcased the bot’s prowess in understanding complex questions, generating pictures and handling basic arithmetic.
“Ernie Bot has completed a series of significant updates in its abilities of understanding, prompting, reasoning and memorising,” Li said. “Its generalised abilities are by no means inferior compared to GPT-4.”
Amid a race to catch up with OpenAI, the Microsoft-backed start-up that launched ChatGPT in November 2022, Chinese firms have unveiled more than 100 large language models this year.
ChatGPT and rival products like Google’s Bard are not officially available in mainland China or Hong Kong, although Microsoft has been pushing its GPT-4-powered Bing Chat in the region. In the absence of foreign players, Chinese tech giants from traditional internet firms like Baidu and Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post, to hardware makers like Vivo and Oppo have been pushing their own AI products that are designed to avoid the kinds of sensitive questions and answers that have made third-party ChatGPT apps a target of local regulators.
Chinese authorities have issued new guidelines and rules this year meant to ensure AI-generated content aligns with official narratives. A proposed regulation published by a government body this week, for instance, suggests using a blacklist system to block LLM training data materials in which more than 5 per cent of the content is deemed illegal.
When asked questions on topics considered sensitive in China, Baidu’s Ernie Bot shuts down that dialogue by suggesting other topics of conversation.
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