In the quest for AI dominance, Chinese tech giant Baidu has released Ernie 4.0, its latest AI model. The company announced it at the Baidu World Conference held in Beijing.
Baidu is a Chinese multinational technology company that specializes in internet-related services, products, and artificial intelligence (AI).
It was founded in January 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu and is headquartered in Beijing’s Haidian District.
Baidu is one of the largest AI and internet companies in the world and is incorporated in the Cayman Islands.
It offers a range of internet-related services, including a search engine, social networking service, online encyclopedia, translation service, and open online platform for users to share documents.
Ernie AI
Ernie AI is a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model developed by Baidu, a Chinese multinational technology company.
Baidu started building Ernie in 2019, making it one of the earliest firms anywhere to experiment with such “generative” AI.
It was officially launched by Baidu in March 2023, after the Chinese government approved its application, alongside that of several other AI companies.
Ernie has a chatbot service that uses AI to generate responses to user queries and is subject to the Chinese government’s censorship regime.
The release of Ernie 4.0 represents a significant leap in the realm of AI. Li highlighted its remarkable memory capabilities and demonstrated its real-time creative abilities, including writing a martial arts novel and crafting advertising materials such as posters and videos.
Criticisms on Ernie
Although Baidu has received government approval to release AI products to the public and is among the firms at the forefront of AI models in China, it has some controversial views on science and often attempts to redirect sensitive conversation.
According to Li, Baidu plans to incorporate artificial intelligence technology into its search engine, maps, and cloud drive services, and its business intelligence offerings for enterprise customers.
Alongside Ernie is the GPT-4 by OpenAI which has been one of the top most discussed AI tools around the world. These two tools reflect the fight for dominance in the AI world by both China and the US which hold 40% and 50% of LLMs globally, respectively.
