China’s Baidu Announces ChatGPT Rival Ernie

Baidu, China’s search engine giant, introduced ChatGPT rival Ernie Bot. Since ChatGPT blew the world away, Baidu has been widely considered the closest Chinese candidate to build an equivalent to the OpenAI chatbot. Ernie is only available for testing through invitation and others need to get on a waitlist.

China’s Baidu Announces ChatGPT Rival Ernie

Baidu CEO Robin Li gave a one-hour presentation on Ernie that only offered a small glimpse into the chatbot. Industry observers inside and outside China pointed to the fact that rather than showcasing Ernie through a live demo, Baidu opted for a lengthy presentation with pre-recordings of Ernie’s answers. The company’s shares also dropped 10% in Hong Kong following Li’s presentation.

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In slides, Li presented the prompts for Ernie and its answers in five functional areas:

• Literature writing: The user asked Ernie for advice on writing a sequel to the celebrated sci-fi novel “The Three-Body Problem.”
• Business writing: The user asked Ernie to suggest names for a large-language model company that helps small-and-medium enterprises digitize.
• Logic and reasoning: Ernie was asked to solve the famous “chickens and rabbits” math puzzle.
  Chinese interpretation: The user asked Ernie to define a traditional Chinese idiom and write a poem based on the phrase.
• Multi-modal generation: Ernie was given a question (“Which city is most suited for implementing smart transport?”) and asked to perform “multi-modal” tasks based on the initial prompt, such as reading the answer out in a Chinese dialect and generating an image based on the text.

Baidu evidently did try to demonstrate what Ernie could achieve. The answers were satisfactory; but still, investors weren’t impressed. Let’s see what Baidu will do to make its chatbot better.

See Also: Apple Engineers Reportedly Working on ChatGPT-Like AI