Chinese tech giant Baidu just released its answer to ChatGPT

On Thursday, Robin Li, Baidu’s cofounder and CEO, took the stage in Beijing to showcase the corporate’s new massive language mannequin, Ernie Bot. Accompanied by artwork created by Baidu’s image-making AI, he confirmed examples of what the chatbot can do, together with clear up math questions, write advertising copy, answer questions on Chinese literature, and generate multimedia responses. 

Baidu had deliberate for this mid-March product launch for months. But it was intercepted by the sudden launch on Tuesday of OpenAI’s GPT-4, which clearly grew to become a reference level for everybody watching Baidu’s actions, together with the CEO himself. “People are expecting to benchmark Ernie Bot against ChatGPT, or even GPT-4. That’s a very high bar,” Li stated firstly of his presentation.

As anticipated, Ernie Bot (the title stands for “Enhanced Representation from kNowledge IntEgration;” its Chinese title is 文心一言, or Wenxin Yiyan) performs notably effectively on duties particular to Chinese tradition, like explaining a historic truth or writing a conventional poem. (Li says as a Chinese firm, Baidu “has to perform better than any pre-trained LLMs” when it comes to understanding Chinese.) 

But the spotlight of the product launch was Ernie Bot’s multimodal output characteristic, which ChatGPT and GPT-4 don’t provide (OpenAI has bragged about GPT-4’s capability to analyze a photograph of the contents of a fridge and provide you with recipe options, however the mannequin generates solely textual content). Li confirmed a recorded interplay with the bot the place it generated an illustration of a futuristic metropolis transportation system, used Chinese dialect to learn out a textual content answer, and edited and subtitled a video based mostly on the identical textual content. However, in later testing after the launch, a Chinese publication failed to reproduce the video era. 

The Chinese public has been hungry for a ChatGPT various; each OpenAI and the Chinese authorities have barred people in China from utilizing the American chatbot.

But up to now, Ernie Bot has been made out there solely to a particularly choose pool of Chinese creators. Companies can apply for API entry. But Baidu has not stated whether or not the know-how will likely be out there for customers. It’s additionally unclear when the bot will likely be built-in into Baidu’s different merchandise, like its search engine or self-driving vehicles, as the corporate promised.

Compared with the rollouts of ChatGPT and GPT-4, Ernie Bot’s launch felt rushed. The presentation didn’t characteristic any reside demo however as a substitute used 5 pre-recorded periods. Li additionally repeatedly stated that Ernie continues to be imperfect and can enhance as soon as it reaches extra customers. Baidu’s inventory value slipped by 6.4% on Thursday, and social media is filled with disenchanted reactions.

Li appeared ready for such a response. “People have been asking me for a while: Why are you releasing [Ernie Bot] so soon? Are you ready for it?” he stated throughout his presentation. “From what I personally saw when conducting internal tests on Ernie Bot, it’s not perfect. But why do we want to release it today? Because the market demands it.” 

The race to be the primary

While a number of ChatGPT-style bots have already been released by Chinese corporations or researchers, none of them has proven satisfying outcomes. MOSS, an English-language chatbot developed by Fudan University researchers in Shanghai, was met with such excessive demand that its server broke down inside a day of launch in late February. It has but to return. MiniMax, a Chinese startup, released a chatbot known as Inspo earlier this month, nevertheless it has been suspected of merely repackaging the GPT-3.5 mannequin developed by OpenAI.

Many individuals anticipated that Baidu can be the primary Chinese firm to go head to head with ChatGPT. Back in 2019, Baidu released a GPT-3 equal—Ernie 3.0. It additionally released a decently highly effective text-to-image mannequin known as Ernie-ViLG final yr. 

The firm has a number of benefits that allow it to stand out amongst its Chinese friends. It has designed its personal AI computing chip, Kunlun, that was utilized in coaching and working the Ernie fashions and will defend the corporate from the ever-growing US-China pressure round semiconductors. Also, having made a search engine, a web-based encyclopedia, a dialogue discussion board, and a media publishing platform since 2000, Baidu can entry Chinese language coaching materials from a wide range of proprietary sources. According to Baidu’s press launch, Ernie Bot is skilled on “trillions of web pages, tens of billions of search and image data, hundreds of billions of daily voice data, and a knowledge graph of 550 billion facts.”

At the launch, Li in contrast Baidu to large tech companies within the West. “I can say Baidu is the first one among international tech giants to release [a ChatGPT alternative developed internally]. Microsoft just uses OpenAI access. Google, Meta, Amazon—none of these has released a product of the same kind and at the same level,” he stated.

The inevitable comparability to GPT-4

With the recent launch of GPT-4, it’s no shock that individuals are trying to evaluate the 2. But it’s troublesome to achieve this. Both corporations are guarded concerning the technical particulars of their chatbots.

Like OpenAI, Baidu additionally determined to not reveal what number of parameters there are within the newest model of Ernie. The variety of parameters in a mannequin is often seen as an indicator of how highly effective it’s. Figures can be found for his or her last-generation merchandise: OpenAI’s GPT-3, released in June 2020, had 175 billion parameters, and Baidu’s Ernie 3.0 Titan, released in December 2021, had 260 billion parameters. 

Although Ernie Bot can’t analyze photographs like GPT-4, it does provide extra output choices. In the presentation, the chatbot learn out the textual content answer in Sichuanese, a preferred dialect spoken in southwestern China. Li additionally stated the mannequin can generate audio in different types of Chinese, like Cantonese, Hokkien, and the Dongbei dialect.

The high quality of the solutions it supplies is perhaps one other matter. In a livestream after the launch, X.Pin, a Chinese tech publication, requested each Ernie Bot and GPT-4 among the similar questions in Chinese. While the Baidu know-how might answer most questions coherently, it made extra errors. It had hassle accurately answering trivia questions on Chinese historical past, remembering the context through which questions have been posed, and producing code to make a mini sport. The reviewers have been additionally unable to take a look at out the video era capability. Ernie Bot refused to achieve this, saying it wanted a while to edit and course of the info.

Rushing it out for enterprise companions

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that to get Ernie Bot prepared for the massive launch, Baidu requested workers to work by way of public holidays, employed further contractors to assessment the bot’s solutions, and pooled sources like Nvidia’s A100 computing chips from different AI groups on the firm. 

Since then, there have been different hints that the chatbot was not prepared for extensive deployment. Baidu had beforehand stated that Ernie can be built-in into lots of the firm’s merchandise, together with self-driving autos and the flagship search engine. But the product launch featured none of these purposes or explanations of how such integration would work.

Many observers have been disenchanted that the discharge occasion used solely pre-recorded movies of interactions with the chatbot, which could be simply filtered and edited. It was additionally identified that lots of the multimodal capabilities showcased on Thursday can already be achieved with Baidu’s present AI instruments, just like the image-making AI from 2022 or a video modifying instrument it released in 2020, so the innovation is extra about integrating them into yet one more accessible interface.

While Baidu has developed completely different sorts of AI fashions for years, Ernie Bot appears to be like extra like a means to bundle the corporate’s current capabilities for enterprise customers to undertake extra simply. 

And it’s clear that enterprise purchasers, as a substitute of most of the people, have been the primary goal of this launch occasion. “Ernie Bot won’t just impact search engines and internet companies. It will impact every single company,” Li stated throughout his presentation. “It will shorten the distance between every company and their customers.”

According to Baidu, 650 corporations had signed up earlier than Ernie Bot’s launch to use the know-how, and greater than 30,000 others have utilized for the API entry because the launch occasion. Previous information reporting suggests the businesses concerned about utilizing the chatbot embody the pc maker Lenovo, the journey portal Trip.com, and several other Chinese automotive corporations. While there’s at the moment no indication of what these partnerships might appear like, we’ll possible discover out extra as Baidu rolls out the API within the coming months.