Chinese online search giant Baidu to launch its answer to ChatGPT in shadow of OpenAI’s upgraded GPT-4 model

Chinese search engine giant Baidu is expected to unveil its ChatGPT-like service Ernie Bot on Thursday, a day after OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, released the upgraded GPT-4 artificial intelligence (AI) model.

The Ernie Bot, or Wenxin Yiyan in Chinese, will be available on the company’s signature search engine plus a number of its affiliated products, including self-driving unit Apollo, video streaming platform iQiyi and its cloud computing business, the company said earlier.

The performance of Baidu AI, powered by Baidu’s Ernie model, is expected to be compared to the eye-opening performance of GPT-4, which processes vast amounts of online information to generate text and answers that are virtually indistinguishable from human responses.

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While Baidu has claimed that its model has 260 billion parameters, compared to 175 billion parameters for GPT-3, there are concerns that Baidu’s performance could be less impressive than GPT-4’s, partly due to the limits of available web page information in Chinese.

One of the major challenges Baidu faces is the “dwindling traffic” drawn to its ecosystem, as a lot of online information in China is in mobile apps and will not be shared with Baidu’s AI tool, according to a former developer at Baidu’s Mobile Ecosystem Group.

“A generative AI needs huge troves of data to improve its performance,” a programmer now based in Chongqing working for a foreign cloud computing company, said. “Most content today is generated on mobile applications tightly controlled by other big tech companies in China, therefore Baidu needs to rely on data-crawling to gain access to these data sources, but apps make this data mining process harder compared to web pages.”

Baidu announced its ambitions for a ChatGPT-like service last month amid an AI frenzy triggered by the OpenAI product. In February, company founder Robin Li Yanhong said he was “very excited about the opportunities around generative AI”, after reporting a 1 per cent revenue decline in 2022.

In the last four months, the Microsoft-backed OpenAI has significantly upgraded its AI tool. Different from GPT-3 that only handles text-based information, GPT-4 is a “multimodal” model that can process text and image inputs. Paid subscribers to ChatGPT Plus are able to access the text capabilities powered by GPT-4 starting Tuesday, while its image-recognition capabilities are still being worked out between OpenAI and its partner Be My Eyes.

However, OpenAI said that the GPT-4 model as “not fully reliable”, that it “hallucinates” facts and makes reasoning errors, and that it “can have various biases in its outputs”.

OpenAI products are not officially available in China, leaving the domestic market of 1 billion internet users up for grabs.

Baidu has been so rushed to get Ernie Bot ready for release that teams from non-AI departments have been asked to chip in and help the project, and some employees said that they lacked enough time to build a well-functioning product, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.

Baidu is not the only Chinese firm in the race to build a generative AI, which uses algorithms to create new content, including text, audio, images, video and simulations.

Alibaba Group Holding and Tencent Holdings are among several Chinese tech firms that have announced plans for their own generative AI products. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.