Robin Li, Baidu’s CEO and cofounder, took to the stage in Beijing on Thursday to present the company's Ernie Bot large-language model. He was accompanied by Baidu's image making AI and showed the chatbot examples such as writing marketing copy, solving math problems, answering questions about Chinese literature, or generating multimedia responses.
For months, Baidu had been planning for this mid-March product launch. It was interrupted by the sudden release of OpenAI's GPT-4 on Tuesday. This became a reference point for all who were watching Baidu's activities including the CEO. People expect to compare Ernie Bot against ChatGPT or GPT-4. Li stated at the beginning that this was a high bar.
Ernie Bot, which stands for "Enhanced Representation from kNowledgeIntEgration" in Chinese, is a great performer on tasks related to Chinese culture such as explaining a historical fact and writing a traditional Chinese poem. Baidu, a Chinese company, "must perform better than any pretrained LLMs" when it comes to understanding Chinese.
Ernie Bot's multimodal output was the main highlight of the product launch. ChatGPT and GPT-4 don't offer it. OpenAI boasted about GPT-4's ability analyze a photograph of a fridge and generate recipe suggestions. However, the model only generates text. Li demonstrated a recorded interaction where the bot generated an illustration for a futuristic city transportation system. It also used Chinese dialects to read out a text response and then edited and subtitled the video. A Chinese publication was unable to reproduce the video creation in later testing.
Chinese people are hungry for an alternative to ChatGPT. Both OpenAI and China have banned individuals from using ChatGPT in China.
Ernie Bot is currently only available to a very select group of Chinese creators. API access can be requested by companies. Baidu has yet to say if the technology will be made available to consumers. The company has not yet indicated when the bot will be integrated in other Baidu products like its search engine and self-driving cars.
Ernie Bot's release felt very rushed compared to the GPT-4 and ChatGPT rollouts. Instead of a live demo, the presentation used five prerecorded sessions. Li repeatedly stated that Ernie was still in its infancy and would improve as it is used by more people. Baidu stock price fell 6.4% Thursday. Social media is filled with disappointed reactions.
Li appeared ready for such a reply. "People have been asking me since a while: Why do you release [Ernie Bot] so quickly? He said it during his presentation. It's not perfect, as I saw it during internal testing on Ernie Bot. Why would we release it now? It's because the market requires it.
The race for the first
Although a few ChatGPT-style chatbots have been released by Chinese researchers and companies, none of these bots has produced satisfactory results. MOSS, an English-language chatbot created by Fudan University researchers from Shanghai, was so popular that it crashed within one day of its launch in February. It has not yet to return. MiniMax, a Chinese startup that launched Inspo, a chatbot earlier this month. However, it was suspected to merely repackage the GPT-3.5 model created by OpenAI.
Many expected Baidu to be the first Chinese company that would compete with ChatGPT. Baidu also released an equivalent GPT-3 model, Ernie 3.0 in 2019. Last year, it also released an Ernie-ViLG text-to-image model that is quite powerful.
It has some advantages that make it stand out from its Chinese counterparts. Kunlun, the company's own AI computing chip, was created. It was used to train and operate the Ernie models. This could help protect the company from the growing tension between the US and China over semiconductors. Baidu has also created an AI computing chip, Kunlun, which is an online encyclopedia and discussion forum. It can also access Chinese language training materials from a variety private resources. Baidu's press release states that Ernie Bot has been trained on "trillions" of web pages, tens to billions search and image data, hundreds and billions daily voice data and a knowledge graph with 550 billion facts.
Li compared Baidu's launch to the West's big tech companies. "I can tell you that Baidu is the first international tech giant to release [a ChatGPT replacement developed internally]. Microsoft only uses OpenAI access. He said that Google, Meta, Amazon have all released products of the same type and quality.
A comparison to GPT-4
It's not surprising that people want to compare GPT-4 and the new GPT-4. But it's difficult to do so. Both companies are very careful about discussing the technical details of chatbots.
Baidu, like OpenAI, also chose not to reveal the number of parameters in Ernie's latest version. A model's number of parameters is often a sign of its power. For their last-generation products, figures are available: OpenAI's GPT-3 had 175 billion parameters in June 2020 and Baidu’s Ernie 3.0 Titan had 260 billion parameters in December 2021.
Ernie Bot is unable to analyze images as complex as GPT-4 but it offers more output options. The chatbot read the text answer in Sichuanese (a dialect popular in southwestern China). Li said that the model can also generate audio in other varieties Chinese languages, such as Cantonese, Hokkien and Dongbei.
It is possible that the quality of the answers it provides may be a different matter. X.Pin (a Chinese tech publication) asked GPT-4 and Ernie Bot the same questions in Chinese during a livestream. Although the Baidu technology was able to answer most questions in a coherent manner, it made more errors. It was unable to correctly answer trivia questions about Chinese history, recall the context, or generate code to create a mini-game. Reviewers could not also test the video generation capability. Ernie Bot said that it was not possible to do this, stating that the software needed time to process and edit the data.
Speeding it out to business partners
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Baidu had asked employees to work on public holidays to prepare Ernie Bot for the big launch. They also hired additional contractors to review Ernie Bot's answers and pooled resources such as Nvidia's A100 computing chip from other AI teams within the company.
There have been other indications that the chatbot is not ready to be widely deployed. Baidu previously stated that Ernie would be integrated in many of its products, including the flagship search engine and self-driving cars. However, the product release did not include any of these applications nor explanations about how this integration would work.
Many people were disappointed that the event featured only prerecorded video of chatbot interactions. These can easily be filtered and edited. Many of the multimodal functions shown on Thursday could be accomplished with Baidu's existing AI tools. This includes the image-making AI in 2022 and a video editing tool in 2020. The innovation is about integrating these AI tools into a more accessible interface.
Baidu has been developing different types of AI models over the years. Ernie Bot is more like a way for business users to use existing capabilities to make it easier to adopt.
It's evident that this launch event was primarily targeted at enterprise clients and not the general public. "Ernie Bot will not only impact search engines and online companies. It will affect every company," Li stated during his presentation. It will reduce the distance between companies and customers.
Baidu reports that 650 companies signed up to Ernie Bot before the launch of the technology. More than 30,000 people have applied for API access since then. According to previous news reports, some Chinese auto companies and computer manufacturer Lenovo are interested in the chatbot. Although there is no information at this time about the potential partnerships, we will likely learn more as Baidu releases the API over the next months.
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By: Zeyi Yang
Title: Chinese tech giant Baidu releases its answer to ChatGPT
Sourced From: www.technologyreview.com/2023/03/16/1069919/baidu-ernie-bot-chatgpt-launch/
Published Date: Thu, 16 Mar 2023 21:51:01 +0000
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