Baidu, a search engine provider in China, announced that Ernie 3.5, its latest version of the ChatGPT-style service, has surpassed the Microsoft-backed OpenAI chatbot in various important measures.
According to Baidu, the Ernie 3.5 model, the newest iteration of its Ernie AI, has outperformed ChatGPT in terms of comprehensive ability scores and has shown superior performance in several Chinese language capabilities compared to GPT-4.
The announcement by Baidu was made in response to a test conducted by the state newspaper China Science Daily, which utilized datasets like AGIEval and C-Eval. These benchmarks are commonly used to evaluate the performance of AI models. Baidu’s success in this evaluation highlights its growing prominence in the field of artificial intelligence.
This development comes at a time when ChatGPT, backed by OpenAI, has created a global sensation, with its influence extending to China. Consequently, numerous domestic companies in China have rushed to announce their own competing products. Baidu was the first major Chinese tech company to introduce an AI product to rival ChatGPT.
In March, they unveiled Ernie Bot, a language AI built on Baidu’s previous Ernie 3.0 AI model, which has been undergoing invite-only testing over the past three months. Following suit, other prominent Chinese tech firms, including Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, have also revealed their respective AI models.
Baidu emphasizes that its new model offers improved training and inference efficiency, enabling faster and more cost-effective iterations in the future. Additionally, the company stated that its new model will support external plugins, allowing for enhanced functionality.
These plugins serve as additional applications that enable Baidu’s AI to handle specific scenarios such as summarizing lengthy text and generating more accurate answers. Notably, ChatGPT had introduced plugin support in March, and Baidu aims to provide a similar capability with its advanced AI model.
