Baidu will release its generative AI bot in March with a 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 that Baidu uses.
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 that researchers at Baidu developed. The Ernie model stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration and dates from 2019. The source code of that model is now also available posted on GitHub. The model is part of several large models, such as those 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 exactly what the AI chatbot can do and what it is capable of. Over the years, Baidu has set up a research department with ambitious plans in the field of generative artificial intelligence. Ernie 3.0 Titan, released in 2021, has 260 billion parameters. These are the predictive values of a generative chat model. That is more parameters than, for example, ChatGPT, 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 understanding and generating language,” says a Baidu spokesperson.
China’s Baidu is one of many major tech companies that currently appear to be engaged 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, in addition to the Chinese script, is also trained in the Western script. It is not clear whether Baidu has plans to eventually release the chatbot for Western users and in what form that will happen.
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 said to have enlisted the help of Larry Page and Sergey Brin again to come up with an answer to ChatGPT.