Baidu Claims Ernie 4.0 AI Chatbot Rivals OpenAI's GPT-4

pcmag.com:

Chinese tech company Baidu just unveiled the latest version of its Ernie AI chatbot and claims it now rivals OpenAI's GPT-4. Previously, Baidu claimed Ernie had surpassed ChatGPT 3.5.

As AP reports, Ernie 4.0 was unveiled during the Baidu World conference in Beijing by the company's CEO Robin Li, who stated "It is not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4."

This latest iteration of Ernie was shown generating advertising posters and marketing videos as part of a live demonstration, as well as being asked to generate a martial arts novel, including characters with different personalities.

According to Li, Ernie 4.0 has achieved "comprehension, reasoning, memory and generation," and is able to cope with complex questions and reasoning. However, as Reuters reports, Ernie 4.0 failed to impress analysts during the conference mainly because the upgraded capabilities weren't immediately obvious.

Baidu also used the conference to announce generative AI is making its way into the company's other service, including Baidu Drive and Baidu Maps. Natural language queries are now possible for Chinese users when using Maps to plan a journey, for example. The company's search engine will also return custom answer to queries rather than just a list of links.

Comparing the capabilities of Ernie 4.0 to GPT-4 is a bold claim considering the existing use cases for GPT-4 and how poorly Ernie performed when it first appeared back in March. Microsoft is using GPT-4 to turn GitHub Copilot into ChatGPT for programmers, it's capable of creating a playable version of Pong in seconds, and Duolingo is using it to offer subscribers AI-powered language learning.

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