Chinese online search giant Baidu to launch its answer to ChatGPT in shadow of OpenAI’s upgraded GPT-4 model
- There are concerns that Baidu’s performance could be less impressive than GPT-4’s, partly due to limited web page information in Chinese
- OpenAI products are not officially available in China, leaving the domestic market of 1 billion internet users up for grabs
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.
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.