21:47 19 March 2023
Chinese tech giant Baidu just released its answer to ChatGPT
Robin Li, Baidu’s co-founder, and CEO, took the stage in Beijing to showcase the company’s new large language model, Ernie Bot. Accompanied by art created by Baidu’s image-making AI, he showed examples of what the chatbot can do, including solving math questions, write marketing copy, answering questions about Chinese literature, and generating multimedia responses.
As expected, Ernie Bot (the name stands for “Enhanced Representation from kNowledge IntEgration;” its Chinese name is 文心一言, or Wenxin Yiyan) performs particularly well on tasks specific to Chinese culture, like explaining a historical fact or writing a traditional poem.
Baidu had planned for this mid-March product release for months. But it was intercepted by the unexpected release on Tuesday of OpenAI’s GPT-4, which clearly became a reference point for everyone watching Baidu’s activities.
(WBJ)
