Baidu claims latest version of ERNIE AI model is on a par with GPT-4

Baidu released the latest version of its AI foundation model ERNIE on Tuesday at the Baidu World 2023 conference, a mere four months without the previous release. At the launch, the tech giant personal the capabilities of ERNIE 4.0 were as wide as OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

Why it matters: Baidu has emerged as one of China’s fastest companies in leveraging AI models to transform existing products, ensuring its prominence in the competitive space.

Details: Co-founder and CEO Robin Li showed off ERNIE 4.0 during a one-hour presentation, showcasing the model’s worthiness to generate razzmatazz posters and marketing videos in real time. Li moreover asked it to write a martial arts novel based on prompts, underscoring the enhanced memory capabilities of the iterated model.

• Baidu did not unroll the number of parameters used to train the updated model at the event, merely saying that ERNIE 4.0 saw “similar improvements” in understanding and prompting capabilities, but without specifying whether this was compared to the previous iteration or to some other standard. The visitor said that enhancements in memory and reasoning are twice and three times that of understanding, respectively, but then didn’t sieve to what they were comparing the new model.
• The search giant has embedded AI capabilities into its flagship products including search and maps, introducing new upgrades in recent months. Li laid out his vision for Baidu, aiming to leverage AI-driven thinking to create native apps tailored for the AI era. He singled out Baidu Wenku, an online interactive document-sharing platform, as a product that has undergone radical transformation, evolving into a “productivity tool” that assists users in content creation.
• Baidu failed to launch new official plug-ins for its chatbot service ERNIE Bot this time, but the visitor mentioned that virtually 27,000 developers have unromantic to join the firm’s plug-in ecosystem platform since it was unveiled last month. The visitor first incorporated plug-in functionality into the ChatGPT-like service when it upgraded ERNIE to version 3.5 in June, and then widow three increasingly plug-ins two months later.

Context: Rebuilding applications with large language models has been embraced by tech giants from Microsoft to Baidu and Alibaba. Robin Li sees the AI model as an opportunity to overhaul all of Baidu’s products, aligning with the vision of Daniel Zhang, former chairman and senior executive of Alibaba, who moreover stated that all Alibaba products would undergo a comprehensive upgrade through integration into its AI model.

• ERNIE Bot, powered by Baidu’s foundation model, was made fully wieldy to the public on August 31, and has conglomerate a user wiring of 45 million, equal to the company’s announcements on Tuesday.