Baidu, the Chinese search engine, announced that its chatbot, based on the Ernie AI model, has surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT in various important areas. With the rapid advancements in generative AI, this highlights the fierce competition between technology giants in the United States and China.
B. Main Body: Baidu has been conducting public tests of its Ernie Bot, in China since its unveiling in March. Baidu’s foundational AI model powers the chatbot called Ernie, and the latest version is called Ernie 3.5. According to Baidu, as reported by the China Science Daily journal, Ernie 3.5 has outperformed OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 model in several benchmark tests, which is the basis for ChatGPT.
Notably, Ernie 3.5 even surpassed OpenAI’s more advanced GPT 4 model in Chinese language tests. These achievements underscore Baidu’s significant progress in generative AI and highlight the intensifying competition between U.S. and Chinese tech giants.
The Chinese science journal cited various tests to demonstrate Ernie 3.5’s superior performance. One of the tests focused on standard admission and qualification exams, such as those required for college admissions or to become a lawyer. Ernie 3.5 outperformed both ChatGPT and GPT 4 in the Chinese language.
Another test included over 13,000 multiple-choice questions covering more than 50 subjects. Ernie 3.5 showed better results in this evaluation than ChatGPT and GPT 4.
However, in a third test developed by a group of U.S. universities, which featured questions on diverse subjects like science and humanities, Ernie 3.5 fell behind both ChatGPT and GPT 4.
Haifeng Wang, CTO of Baidu, highlighted the enhancements achieved by Ernie 3.5 in terms of efficacy, functionality, and performance. Wang mentioned improvements in creative writing, Q&A, reasoning, code generation, training performance, and inference performance.
One notable feature of Baidu’s latest model is its ability to access “plugins,” which are essentially apps that can be accessed via the Ernie Bot. For example, Baidu has integrated its search feature with Ernie Bot through a plugin, allowing for expanded functionality.
In the rapidly evolving landscape of AI, Baidu’s advancements with Ernie 3.5 demonstrate their commitment to pushing the boundaries of generative AI and expanding the capabilities of their chatbot.