Baidu AI Cloud Releases “Wenxin Qianfan” Large-Scale Model Platform

Chinese AI company Baidu on March 27 held a closed-door communication meeting with the first batch of companies and released cloud services and application products related to ERNIE Bot, its latest conversational AI bot. According to 21st Century Business Herald, some business insiders who participated in the meeting revealed that Baidu AI Cloud also released an all-in-one enterprise-level large-scale model platform called “Wenxin Qianfan”, which will provide customers with language model services.

SEE ALSO: Baidu Unveils ChatGPT-Style “ERNIE Bot”

It is reported that Wenxin Qianfan’s large-scale model platform not only includes ERNIE Bot but also includes Baidu‘s full set of Wenxin large-scale models and corresponding development toolchains. In the future, Wenxin Qianfan will support third-party open-source large-scale models and become a hub for large-scale models’ production and distribution.

The aforementioned insider revealed that the inference services for Wenxin Qianfan’s large-scale model platform are priced at 0.012 yuan ($0.0017)/1000 tokens, paid according to the total number of input/output words per call, which is cheaper than ChatGPT. Earlier this month, OpenAI announced the opening of its API (application programming interface), with pricing set at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens.

At the communication meeting, Baidu demonstrated five scene demo videos including government-related services, financial services, corporate offices, e-commerce services and tourism services.

In the corporate office scenario, Wenxin Qianfan can create slides within three minutes. In e-commerce scenarios, it can quickly generate product promotion scripts and initiate digital live streaming sales with one click. In tourism scenarios, it can generate travel plans under simple communication while completing air ticket/hotel reservations.

This also means that through Baidu AI Cloud’s external provision of service via “Wenxin Yiyuan” is rapidly realizing. Previously, at the launch conference of ERNIE Bot, Baidu‘s Chairman and CEO Robin Li pointed out that its AI bot will be provided to customers through Baidu AI Cloud to help companies create their own models and applications.

In fact, since the release of ERNIE Bot on March 16, Baidu AI Cloud has also opened up the corresponding API services for enterprise customers. According to data disclosed by Baidu, as of 11:00 am on March 18, 12 companies have completed the first batch of signed cooperation agreements and there were nearly 90 thousand enterprises applying for testing of Baidu AI Cloud’s ERNIE Bot API service test.

According to people who joined the communication meeting on March 27, more than 120 thousand companies are currently queuing up to access ERNIE Bot in various fields such as government affairs, finance, e-commerce, automobiles and marketing.