Baidu releases its generative AI bot in March with larger model than ChatGPT
Chinese web giant Baidu will release a public version of its AI chatbot in March. It uses a larger language model than ChatGPT. The AI chatbot will be named Ernie, a derivative of the language model used by Baidu.
Baidu confirms the arrival of the chatbot opposite The Registerafter there before in Chinese media was talked about. The name Ernie is based on the natural language processing model developed by researchers at Baidu. The Ernie model stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration and dates from 2019. The source code of that model is now also available put on GitHub. The model is part of several large models, such as the one for understanding and writing language, which Baidu calls Ernie 3.0 Titan. Another model from Baidu is called Ernie-ViLG and is intended for generating images from text.
It is not known what exactly the AI chatbot can do and what it is capable of. Over the years, Baidu has established a research department with ambitious plans in generative artificial intelligence. Ernie 3.0 Titan, which came out in 2021, has 260 billion parameters. Those are the predictive values of a generative chat model. That’s more parameters than ChatGPT, for example, which uses 175 billion. According to a Baidu spokesperson, Ernie would stand out from the rest of the AI chatbots: “Ernie has the ability to integrate extensive knowledge with a huge amount of data, resulting in exceptional performance in language understanding and generation.” says a Baidu spokesman.
China’s Baidu is one of many major tech companies that currently appear to be embroiled in an AI arms race. OpenAI’s ChatGPT recently received a $10 billion investment from Microsoft, which most likely plans to integrate the chatbot into search engine Bing. Google also presented its own chatbot called Bard on Monday evening, although it is not yet publicly available. It is somewhat striking that Baidu, as a Chinese company, releases a chatbot that has been trained on Western script in addition to Chinese script. It is not clear whether Baidu has plans to eventually release the chatbot for Western users and in what form.
The fact that Baidu and Google have already presented plans for their own chatbot without actually showing it indicates that the companies feel the competition from ChatGPT. Google is also said to have enlisted the help of Larry Page and Sergey Brin to come up with an answer to ChatGPT.