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Tag: ERNIE

  • Baidu’s Ernie AI Reveal Stumbles Out of the Gate

    Baidu’s Ernie AI Reveal Stumbles Out of the Gate

    Baidu has revealed its Ernie AI chatbot, and the result has been similar to Google’s AI reveal in that it has stumbled out of the gate.

    Like Google, Baidu has been working overtime to catch up with Microsoft’s Bing AI. Baidu has finally “revealed” its Ernie chatbot, but the reveal did little to reassure investors that the company has a viable product.

    According to Ars Technica, company founder Robin Li only showed a pre-recorded demo of the product at the big reveal. Li tried to emphasize the company’s progress, despite the lackluster showing:

    “Sometimes when we use it we are pleasantly surprised, sometimes we may think there is an obvious error,” Li told the audience. “But one thing is for sure, it’s advancing very fast.

    “Its extremely strong ability to comprehend and express language will allow any company to get closer to their customers,” Li added. “It’s an opportunity for every company and it will even have an impact on every single person.”

    In the aftermath of the “demonstration,” Baidu’s stock tanked by 10% over fears that the company’s AI efforts may not be in as good a position as investors hoped. The sentiment is one shared by at least some Baidu employees.

    “We can only explore by ourselves. Training ChatGPT took OpenAI more than a year, and it took them another year to tune GPT-4,” said one Baidu employee. “It means we’re two years behind.”

  • Baidu Set to Unveil AI-Powered Search

    Baidu Set to Unveil AI-Powered Search

    Baidu is preparing to unveil an AI-powered, ChatGPT-like search engine based on the company’s Ernie tech.

    ChatGPT has become one of the most widely known conversational AIs and threatens to upend the search engine market. Microsoft is believed to be integrating it into a version of Bing, and Google is pulling out all the stops to come up with its own answer.

    According to Bloomberg, via Engadget, China’s Baidu is preparing to launch its own conversational AI search engine. The new product will be based on Ernie, which is the company’s large-scale machine-learning model.

    Baidu no doubt hopes conversational AI will help it reinvigorate its search engine and spark future growth. If the company can move fast enough, it may even be able to gain ground on its rivals.

  • Baidu Takes AI Crown, Achieves New Level of Language Understanding

    Baidu Takes AI Crown, Achieves New Level of Language Understanding

    The ability to talk with an artificial intelligence (AI), be it a computer or robot, has been a staple of science fiction for decades. Despite modern advances, anyone who has used Siri, Alexa, Cortana or the Google Assistant knows we’re still a ways off from what’s portrayed in science fiction.

    Chinese tech giant Baidu has just taken a big step in that direction, however. According to the MIT Technology Review, Baidu has leapfrogged Microsoft and Google in helping AI better understand language.

    General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE) is the industry benchmark used to gauge an AI’s language comprehension skills. For perspective, most humans manage a score of 87 out of 100. Baidu’s model, however, scored a 90—a first for AI models.

    The team attributed their breakthrough with ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration) to the steps they needed to take in order to help it understand Chinese. The most advanced AI language models use a technique called “masking,” where the AI randomly hides words in order to predict the meaning of the sentence. Because of the differences between Chinese and English, Baidu “researchers trained ERNIE on a new version of masking that hides strings of characters rather than single ones. They also trained it to distinguish between meaningful and random strings so it could mask the right character combinations accordingly.”

    Not only did this method allow ERNIE to better understand Chinese language, but those lessons also improved its English processing, enabling it to achieve the highest GLUE score yet. Hopefully, this breakthrough will help pave the way for the type of AI interactions that have, so far, existed only in the realm of science fiction.