Baidu says its Ernie Bot is better than ChatGPT

A new version of Ernie Bot beats its OpenAI rival on several metrics, the Chinese search giant claims.

Baidu said on Tuesday (June 27th) it was “thrilled” to announce that the latest iteration of its AI foundation model, Ernie 3.5, had outperformed ChatGPT in some key areas.

It cited a test carried out by China Science Daily, a state-run newspaper, which showed Ernie 3.5 surpassing ChatGPT based on GPT-3.5 in general abilities.

It also outperformed the more advanced GPT-4 in several Chinese language capabilities, Baidu said in a statement.

Datasets including AGIEval and C-Eval, two benchmarks to evaluate the performance of AI models, were used for testing.

“Ernie 3.5 has achieved broad enhancements in efficacy, functionality, and performance,” Baidu said.

Compared to its earlier version, Ernie 3.0, it “dramatically boosts training throughput by two-fold and inference throughput by an astonishing 17-fold,” the company noted.

Ernie Bot was announced in February and released in March to rival OpeanAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard and has been in public beta testing since. Both ChatGPT and Bard are blocked in China.

Other Chinese tech giants, including Alibaba and Tencent, have followed Baidu to release their own AI products.

As one of the leading internet companies in China, Baidu has invested heavily in AI and is the creator of PaddlePaddle, the country’s first open-source deep-learning platform.

Earlier this year, the company announced that it would seek to carve out a niche in the highly-saturated smartphone market by launching a device that will integrate AI features.

Baidu is also integrating Ernie Bot into its wider ecosystem of devices, such as smart speakers.