Chinese tech giant Baidu publishes response to ChatGPT

As expected, Ernie Bot (the name stands for “Enhanced Representation from kNowledge IntEgration”; his Chinese name is 文心一言, or Wenxin Yiyan) performs particularly well at tasks specific to Chinese culture, such as explaining a historical fact or writing a traditional poem. (Li says that as a Chinese company, Baidu “must outperform any pre-trained LLM” in understanding Chinese.)

But the highlight of the product release was Ernie Bot’s multimodal output feature, which ChatGPT and GPT-4 don’t offer (OpenAI boasted of GPT-4’s ability to analyze a photo of the content of ‘refrigerator and offer recipe suggestions, but the template only generates text). Li showed a recorded interaction with the robot where he generated an illustration of a futuristic city transportation system, used Chinese dialect to read a text response, and edited and captioned a video based on the same text. However, in subsequent tests after launch, a Chinese publication failed to reproduce the video generation.

The Chinese public has been craving a ChatGPT alternative; OpenAI and the Chinese government have banned individuals in China from using the US chatbot.

But so far, Ernie Bot has only been made available to an extremely select group of Chinese designers. Businesses can request access to the API. But Baidu did not say whether the technology will be available to consumers. It’s also unclear when the bot will be integrated with Baidu’s other products, like its search engine or self-driving cars, as the company has promised.

Compared to the ChatGPT and GPT-4 deployments, Ernie Bot’s release felt rushed. The presentation did not feature any live demonstrations, but instead used five pre-recorded sessions. Li also repeatedly said that Ernie is still flawed and will improve once it reaches more users. Baidu’s share price fell 6.4% on Thursday and social media is full of disappointed reactions.

Li seemed prepared for such an answer. “People have been asking me for a while, why are you (Ernie Bot) dating so early? Are you ready for this?” he said during his presentation. “From what I’ve personally seen during internal testing on Ernie Bot, it’s not perfect. release it today because the market demands it.

The race to be the first

While a few ChatGPT-like robots have already been launched by Chinese companies or researchers, none of them have shown satisfactory results. MOSS, an English-language chatbot developed by researchers at Fudan University in Shanghai, encountered such demand that its server went down within a day of its launch in late February. He hasn’t come back yet. MiniMax, a Chinese startup, launched a chatbot called Inspo earlier this month, but it was suspected of simply repackaging the GPT-3.5 model developed by OpenAI.

Many people expected Baidu to be the first Chinese company to take on ChatGPT. In 2019, Baidu released a GPT-3 equivalent, Ernie 3.0. He also released a fairly powerful text-to-image model last year called Ernie-ViLG.