- Baidu announced Tuesday that an artificial intelligence model called Ernie 3.5 has outperformed OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT 4 in several key areas.
- A Chinese search uncovered Ernie Bot in March and has been in public testing in China ever since. This chatbot is based on Baidu’s basic AI model called Ernie.
- The spotlight on Baidu’s progress highlights the fierce competition in the field of generative AI, with tech giants in the US and China developing rapidly.
Chinese tech giant Baidu has launched its own ChatGPT competitor, the Ernie bot.
Photo | Future Publishing | Getty Images
Baidu announced Tuesday that the artificial intelligence model behind its chatbot has outperformed OpenAI’s ChatGPT in several key areas.
The Chinese search engine has been conducting public tests in China since Erniebot was revealed in March. This chatbot is based on Baidu’s basic AI model called Ernie. A base model is an AI trained on massive amounts of data. The latest version of Baidu’s model is called Ernie 3.5.
Citing the China Science Daily journal, Baidu said Ernie 3.5 outperformed ChatGPT in many benchmark tests. ChatGPT is based on OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 model.
Ernie 3.5 also outperformed OpenAI’s latest and more advanced model, GPT 4, in the Chinese language test, according to the journal Science.
The spotlight on Baidu’s progress highlights the fierce competition in the field of generative AI, with tech giants in the US and China developing rapidly.
One of the exams cited by the Chinese scientific journal was based on the standard entrance exams and qualification tests required for college admissions and lawyer qualifications. Ernie 3.5 outperformed his ChatGPT and GPT 4 in Chinese.
However, while it was ahead of ChatGPT in English, it was behind GPT 4. This test was released by Microsoft.
Another test focuses on Chinese and contains over 13,000 multiple-choice questions covering over 50 different subjects. Ernie 3.5 outperformed his ChatGPT and GPT 4 in this rating.
The third test contains questions on various subjects such as science and humanities and was developed by a group of US universities. Ernie 3.5 lagged behind both his ChatGPT and GPT 4.
Baidu has spoken of advances in AI as it seeks to take a technological lead over rivals such as Alibaba.
Baidu CTO Haifeng Wang said in a statement, “Just three months after the beta release of Ernie Bot, Baidu’s large-scale language model (LLM) built on Ernie 3.0, Ernie 3.5 has achieved effectiveness, We have achieved extensive enhancements in functionality and performance.”
“These improvements are evident not only in creative writing, Q&A, inference and code generation, but also in training performance and inference performance.”
According to Baidu, one of the distinguishing features of the latest model is the ability to access “plugins,” which are basically apps that can be accessed via Ernie Bot. Baidu’s search functionality is integrated with Ernie Bot via plugins, for example.
