At the Baidu World 2023 event, CEO Robin Li announced a significant upgrade to ERNIE, Baidu’s counterpart to ChatGPT. He highlighted the remarkable enhancements in understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory that this update brings.
During his keynote presentation, Li demonstrated the improvements in these core capabilities by showcasing ERNIE’s ability to swiftly create a multimodal car commercial based on a short text prompt, solve intricate geometry problems, and spontaneously evolve a short story’s plot. He emphasized that the fourth-generation generative AI system is on par with GPT-4 in every aspect.
ERNIE 4.0 is set to provide an enhanced search experience reminiscent of Google’s SGE. It will aggregate and condense information from the wider web into generated responses, which can be presented as text, images, or animated graphs through an interactive chat interface. This enables users to iteratively refine their queries to obtain the best possible answers, all within a single search interface. Additionally, ERNIE 4.0 will offer personalized content recommendations based on prior interactions with the user.
Much like ChatGPT Enterprise, ERNIE will introduce Generative Business Intelligence, offering finely-tuned and secure models tailored to individual client data silos. Furthermore, ERNIE 4.0 will be capable of various tasks, such as academic research, information summarization, document creation, slideshow presentations, and text and voice-based file retrieval.
Baidu aims to integrate its generative AI into a wide range of apps and services, and it has already incorporated some of its functions into Baidu Maps, covering areas like navigation, ride hailing, and hotel bookings. The company is also facilitating easy access and providing productivity tools for individuals and enterprises to develop API plugins for the Baidu Qianfan Foundation Model Platform.
It’s worth noting that Baidu had been developing its ERNIE large language model for several years, focusing primarily on the Chinese market, before the debut of ChatGPT in 2022. ERNIE Bot, Baidu’s answer to ChatGPT, was made available to the public in August, boasting a knowledge graph with 550 billion facts.
During the event, Baidu’s partner startups unveiled new product series that will integrate the AI’s capabilities, including a domestic robot, an All-in-One learning machine, and a smart home speaker.
