Microsoft also used a pre-recorded clip during the launch of its new Bing search engine with built-in ChatGPT on the same day.
Robin Li, chairman and chief executive officer of Baidu Inc., during the launch of the company’s Earnie Bot in Beijing, on March 16, 2023. Photo: Bloomberg.
Ernie Bot, meanwhile, will initially only be available to some users who receive an invitation code. It will later be gradually opened to the public.
Li spent most of his time on stage going through slides explaining the potential of Baidu’s new piece of tech.
“According to my personal experience with Ernie Bot, I can’t say it’s perfect. The launch now is because there is market demand,” Li said. “The Ernie Bot isn’t a tool for China and the United States to rival, but a natural outcome achieved by generations of Baidu engineers while they dream to use technology to change the world.”
While the general public will not have access to Ernie Bot right away, Baidu said its cloud computing unit would immediately start making the application programming interface (API) available to corporate clients.
Baidu’s launch was both “brave” and “regretful”, said Li Zhi, director of the research institute of Beijing-based consultancy Analysys. “Baidu has been the first Chinese tech company to unveil a large language model after ChatGPT and GPT-4 … But it only showed video demos, which wasn’t as stunning as a live demonstration,” Li said.
ChatGPT has generated immense interest in China despite OpenAI not officially making it available in the market. It is able to answer queries in many languages, including both English and Chinese, something that appears to be a current limitation of Baidu’s bot.
Li said Ernie Bot “is good at processing Chinese language”, but its handling of English “isn’t as good”. Like other language models, Ernie Bot is trained on an immense amount of written material, but it is limited by being ring-fenced inside China’s censored internet environment largely managed by the so-called Great Firewall.
The Ernie model has “the most advanced natural language processing capability in the Chinese language”, the company said in a statement. “Its advancement is not only reflected in its understanding of the Chinese language, but also in its understanding of Chinese culture. Because of this, Baidu Ernie Bot will better suit the Chinese language and the China market than the models developed abroad.”
Baidu plans to integrate Ernie Bot across all of its existing businesses, starting with its signature search engine, the largest in China. The company intends to “reshape the way information is generated and presented”, Baidu said.
The technology will also be embedded into other services such as Baidu’s smart speaker Xiaodu, self-driving unit Apollo and video platform iQiyi.
