Baidu, China's leading search giant, said its latest version of AI chatbot has surpassed OpenAI's ChatGPT on many key parameters.
In a statement released on June 27, Baidu said that Ernie 3.5, the company's latest version of the AI chatbot, surpassed “ChatGPT in comprehensive ability scores” and outperformed “GPT-4 in some specific abilities.”
As evidence for the results, the Beijing-based company cited testing results conducted by China Science Daily, using datasets such as AGIEval and C-Eval to evaluate the performance of artificial intelligence models.
Baidu's move comes as the AI "fever" initiated by ChatGPT has spread to the mainland, prompting a series of companies there to launch competing products.
Baidu was the first major Chinese tech company to launch an AI product to compete with OpenAI's chatbot, with its AI language model Ernie Bot, released in March. The chatbot, which is based on the older Ernie 3.0 model, has been in limited invite-only testing for the past three months.
Meanwhile, other Chinese tech giants like Alibaba Group and Tencent have revealed their respective AI models.
Baidu says its new model comes with improved inference and training efficiency, making chatbots a faster, cheaper solution for repetitive tasks in the future. Ernie 3.5 also supports third-party plug-ins.
“Plug-ins” are additional applications that enable AI models to work in specific situations, such as summarizing long texts and generating more accurate responses. ChatGPT officially supported this feature in March.
New “front” in US-China competition
Paul Triolo, director of technology policy consulting at Albright Stonebridge, said that Washington is likely to increase its targeting of certain types of applications in China and that “artificial AI could be caught up in the vortex next year.”
This comes as the Biden administration “work to determine which technologies could contribute to China’s military modernization, as well as factors that could boost the ability of mainland companies to make breakthroughs in AI.”
AI needs to be trained on massive amounts of data to function. This requires massive amounts of computing power, provided by specialized semiconductor chips, such as those sold by Nvidia, the market leader in AI chips.
The US has already imposed a number of restrictions aimed at cutting off China from Nvidia’s key processors, a move that could hamper Beijing’s AI development. In addition, Washington is conducting a review of foreign investment that could lead to new rules for US companies looking to do business abroad.
“The upcoming foreign investment review order will include restrictions on AI technology, a key indicator of trends in the final two years of the Biden administration,” said Paul Triolo.
Meanwhile, China has made AI development a strategic priority, while also imposing regulations that force the technology to comply with Beijing’s strict internet rules. Even as the US seeks to cut off China from crucial AI chip supplies, the country can still develop its own semiconductors.
(According to CNBC, Reuters)
Source
Comment (0)