Baidu Unveils ChatGPT-Style “ERNIE Bot”

Baidu’s “ERNIE Bot”, known as the Chinese version of ChatGPT, was officially released at the company’s Beijing Headquarters on March 16. Baidu will set up a venue at its PaddlePaddle Center on Artificial Intelligence Island, Zhang Jiang High-Tech Park. Robin Li, founder of Baidu, attended the event and personally introduced the ERNIE Bot.

Robin Li said in his opening remarks: “ERNIE Bot can be seen as Baidu‘s “ten months’ pregnancy”, and finally a ‘delivery’.”

It is understood that Baidu carried out the stress test that lasted until the early morning for many consecutive days. In order to support ERNIE Bot, the largest single-body intelligent computing center in Asia at present, the Yangquan Baidu Intelligent Computing Center in Shanxi, has upped its computing power to 40 billion floating point operations per second, and will provide computing support for ERNIE Bot together with other intelligent computing centers in Yancheng, Jiangsu and other places.

At the press conference, Li demonstrated ERNIE Bot’s comprehensive ability in five use cases: literary creation, commercial copywriting, mathematical calculation, Chinese understanding, and multimodal generation.

From the presentation, ERNIE Bot has some ability to understand human intentions while the accuracy, logic and fluency of the answers are gradually approaching human level. But Li also mentioned that this kind of big language model is far from perfect and has a lot of room for improvement. In the future, the technology will develop rapidly and change with each passing day.

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Recently, Baidu has made several efforts in the field of AI, and today launched an AI product named after ERNIE Bot, known as “the writing tool of the AI era”. Later, Robin Li even announced in Silicon Valley that “a trillion dollars will be invested in AI over the next decade”.

At present, although Baidu‘s AI business has made great progress, Li said in a recent financial report conference call, “We will not regard AI as a core value.” He believes that Baidu‘s core value is technology, but Baidu is not a technology-driven company, which may limit its investment in the technology.