China’s Baidu makes AI chatbot Ernie Bot publicly available

Chinese search engine and artificial intelligence firm Baidu made its ChatGPT-equivalent language model fully available to the public Thursday, raising the company’s stock price by over 3 per cent following the announcement. Beijing sees artificial intelligence as a key industry to rival the United States and aims to become a global leader by 2030.
Chinese technology firms have also raced to unveil their generative AI models — in which algorithms allow the technology to produce and create new content — after US firm OpenAI launched the widely popular ChatGPT.
Baidu said Thursday that Ernie Bot, which generates text and images in response to questions and prompts provided by users, was fully open to the general public via the official website and an app that was only available in China’s app stores. By Thursday afternoon, the Ernie Bot app had topped the charts on Apple’s iOS store in China for free apps.
By releasing the model publicly, Baidu will be able to collect massive real-world human feedback, according to Baidu CEO Robin Li, who said this would in turn help improve Ernie and Baidu’s foundation models.

Ernie Bot’s Key Features

• Leveraging extensive pre-training on vast text datasets
• Utilizing the Transformer architecture to enhance comprehension and text generation
• Demonstrating proficiency across diverse natural language processing assignments
• Enabling communication in multiple languages, encompassing both Chinese and English