Chinese companies may have lagged behind US tech giants like Microsoft and Google in the AI race initially, but that hasn’t stopped them from joining the competition. According to CNBC, Baidu, a major Chinese tech company, has recently claimed that its chatbot, called Ernie Bot, outperforms ChatGPT, the AI model developed by OpenAI.
Baidu announced the release of Ernie 3.5, an improved version of its foundation model, in a blog post. The company stated that Ernie 3.5 has shown significant advancements in beta testing, surpassing ChatGPT 3.5 in comprehensive ability scores and even outperforming GPT-4 in certain Chinese language capabilities. Dr. Haifeng Wang, the CTO of Baidu, highlighted the improvements in creative writing, Q&A, reasoning, code generation, training performance, and inference performance.
Dr. Wang emphasized that Ernie Bot can be applied to various language, text, and code-based applications. Many industries, including smart offices, coding, marketing, media, education, and finance, are already utilizing Ernie Bot through Baidu’s smart work platform, Infoflow. Baidu has introduced new features such as “smart summary,” “smart insights,” and “super assistant,” derived from Ernie Bot.
One of the notable features of Ernie 3.5 is the inclusion of plugins. Baidu has developed default plugins for Baidu Search and a ChatFile plugin that enables long text summary and Q&A. Dr. Wang explained that the model’s capabilities can be expanded through these plugins. Baidu plans to add more plugins developed by both Baidu and third parties, and it is committed to opening the plugin ecosystem to empower developers to create unique applications based on Ernie.
Overall, Baidu is confident in the capabilities of Ernie Bot and its potential to excel in the field of AI language processing.
