China’s Baidu reveals its own generative AI chatbot • The Register

Chinese language internet big Baidu, which has “AI” in its identify and has made AI the main target of its hyperscale cloud, has revealed it should launch a generative AI chatbot later this yr.

Chinese media reported the launch and Baidu confirmed it to The Register.

“The corporate plans to finish inner testing in March earlier than making the chatbot obtainable to the general public,” a Baidu spokesperson wrote.

The bot will likely be named “Wenxin Yiyan文心一言” or “ERNIE Bot” in English.

The spokesperson added that the bots are primarily based on the Enhanced Illustration by Information Integration (Ernie) mannequin first proposed in 2019. We have been instructed Ernie “expands right into a sequence of superior large fashions that may carry out a variety of duties, together with language understanding, language era (ERNIE 3.0 Titan), and text-to-image era (ERNIE-ViLG).”

“What units ERNIE other than different language fashions is its capacity to combine intensive information with large information, leading to distinctive understanding and era capabilities,” the spokesperson added.

Simply what the bot will likely be able to is just not recognized, however Baidu has over time described its ambitions for one thing that sounds an terrible lot like ChatGPT. As we noted yesterday, Baidu has mentioned “proposed a controllable studying algorithm and a reputable studying algorithm to make sure the mannequin can formulate affordable and coherent texts”. It’s carried out the exhausting work to ship such a system, having in 2021 detailed “ERNIE 3.0 Titan” – a pre-training language mannequin with 260 billion parameters.

ChatGPT makes use of the 175-billion parameter GPT3 mannequin.

ERNIE/文心一言 is bilingual in English and Chinese language. A pre-press paper [PDF] from 2021 particulars the efficiency of ERNIE, and asserts that the mannequin is superior to all rivals – together with GPT-3 – at many duties.

Within the months since ChatGPT’s launch it has generated fevered hypothesis that it and rival chatbots represents the way forward for web search, the software program business, and any type of human endeavour that entails writing.

Google’s Monday announcement of its personal generative chatbot named Bard is extensively held to be a considerably panicked response to curiosity in ChatGPT, and maybe to an invite Microsoft issued for a Tuesday occasion anticipated to disclose its personal AI tech.

Baidu’s announcement definitely turned heads: the corporate’s share value spiked round 15 p.c within the hours after the corporate revealed ERNIE/文心一言. ®