A giant competitor came to ChatGPT from China: ERNIE Bot

China is also not idle about artificial intelligence. The country's search engine giant Baidu has already been known to be working on artificial intelligence technologies for a while, and now it has been rivaled by the popular ChatGPT with the ERNIE Bot, which was introduced as part of an event.

The Ernie machine learning model, which Baidu has been working on for nearly 10 years, is at the heart of the introduced ERNIE Bot. In fact, the first version of the ERNIE Bot surfaced in 2019, but it was far from its current counterparts. Baidu CEO Robin Li pointed out at a press event that this version of ERNIE Bot has capabilities close to GPT-4, which OpenAI launched a few days ago, pointing out that the gap is closing.With 550 billion correct parameters, the ERNIE Bot is a model designed entirely focused on the Chinese market. Knowing different dialects of Chinese, the tool can provide voice responses as well as create images and videos from Chinese texts. A demo at the event showed the chatbot summarizing a sci-fi novel and its suggestions for possible sequels. He also shared some details about the cast in a movie adaptation. In another demo, it was demonstrated that he could make name and slogan suggestions for a high-tech company. However, all these demos were not carried out interactively and caused question marks in the minds.

Baidu CEO said in a statement that as many as 650 companies are already lining up to use ERNIE Bot's technology. However, it was underlined that ERNIE Bot is not ready to go public yet. This statement was interpreted as ERNIE Bot was not ready yet, and therefore Baidu's shares in the stock market fell by 10 percent.