Weekly Business Insights from Top Ten Business Magazines | Week 288 | Shaping Section | 3

Extractive summaries of and key takeaways from the articles curated from TOP TEN BUSINESS MAGAZINES to promote informed business decision-making | Week 288 | March 17-23, 2023

Chinese tech giant Baidu just released its answer to ChatGPT

By Zeyi Yang | MIT Technology Review | March 16, 2023

Listen to the Extractive Summary of the Article

On Thursday, Robin Li, Baidu’s cofounder and CEO, took the stage in Beijing to showcase the company’s new large language model, Ernie Bot. Accompanied by art created by Baidu’s image-making AI, he showed examples of what the chatbot can do, including solve math questions, write marketing copy, answer questions about Chinese literature, and generate multimedia responses. 

Baidu had planned for this mid-March product release for months. But it was intercepted by the unexpected release on Tuesday of OpenAI’s GPT-4, which clearly became a reference point for everyone watching Baidu’s activities, including the CEO himself. “People are expecting to benchmark Ernie Bot against ChatGPT, or even GPT-4. That’s a very high bar,” Li said at the beginning of his presentation.

But the highlight of the product release was Ernie Bot’s multimodal output feature, which ChatGPT and GPT-4 do not offer (OpenAI has bragged about GPT-4’s ability to analyze a photo of the contents of a refrigerator and come up with recipe suggestions, but the model generates only text). Li showed a recorded interaction with the bot where it generated an illustration of a futuristic city transportation system, used Chinese dialect to read out a text answer, and edited and subtitled a video based on the same text. However, in later testing after the launch, a Chinese publication failed to reproduce the video generation.   So far, Ernie Bot has been made available only to an extremely select pool of Chinese creators. 

According to Baidu’s press release, Ernie Bot is trained on “trillions of web pages, tens of billions of search and image data, hundreds of billions of daily voice data, and a knowledge graph of 550 billion facts.”

Compared with the rollouts of ChatGPT and GPT-4, Ernie Bot’s release felt rushed. The presentation did not feature any live demo but instead used five pre-recorded sessions. Li also repeatedly said that Ernie is still imperfect and will improve once it reaches more users. Baidu’s stock price slipped by 6.4% on Thursday, and social media is full of disappointed reactions.

At the launch, Li compared Baidu to big tech firms in the West. “I can say Baidu is the first one among international tech giants to release [a ChatGPT alternative developed internally]. Microsoft just uses OpenAI access. Google, Meta, Amazon—none of these has released a product of the same kind and at the same level,” he said.  With the fresh release of GPT-4, it’s no surprise that people are looking to compare the two. But it’s difficult to do so. Both companies are guarded about the technical details of their chatbots.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. On Thursday, Robin Li, Baidu’s cofounder and CEO, took the stage in Beijing to showcase the company’s new large language model, Ernie Bot. He showed examples of what the chatbot can do, including solve math questions, write marketing copy, answer questions about Chinese literature, and generate multimedia responses. 
2. But the highlight of the product release was Ernie Bot’s multimodal output feature, which ChatGPT and GPT-4 do not offer
3. Compared with the rollouts of ChatGPT and GPT-4, Ernie Bot’s release felt rushed. The presentation did not feature any live demo but instead used five pre-recorded sessions. Li also repeatedly said that Ernie is still imperfect and will improve once it reaches more users. Baidu’s stock price slipped by 6.4% on Thursday, and social media is full of disappointed reactions.

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Topics:  Technology, Artificial Intelligence, China