Robin Li, the founder of Baidu Inc., has revealed that the company’s large language model has finally caught up with OpenAI’s advanced GPT-4, claiming the lead in his country’s race to develop AI that can rival the US.
Taking to the stage this week in Beijing, the billionaire told a packed house at a converted steel mill that now serves as an auditorium, that Ernie has matched OpenAI’s seminal product in terms of sophistication and general capabilities.
The Ernie chatbot has now surpassed 45 million users, which is a milestone that still lags ChatGPT’s estimated 180 million, though the US bot launched months earlier.
China’s search leader is pinning its hopes on AI to help it surpass rivals from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. to Tencent Holdings Ltd. that control the rest of the internet.
Across China, Baidu is leading a wave of aggressive investment after ChatGPT demonstrated the disruptive potential of generative AI, which has the possibility to craft video and content from simple commands.
the company is working towards competing compete with American names from Microsoft Corp. to Google to create services like ChatGPT and Dall-E, but US sanctions on Chinese access to the most advanced chips to train and run AI models, coupled with Beijing’s stringent censorship, could cloud their prospects.
Telling the audience, Li said: “Ernie is not inferior in any respect to GPT-4”. He put the latest version of Ernie Bot through its paces in real time, and he also went on to voice queries on topics like buying property, posed math problems and asked it to write a novel set in the world of ancient martial arts.
It’s a marked contrast from March, when the tech mogul unveiled China’s first answer to OpenAI’s red-hot bot via a scripted video.
