The search giant Baidu unveiled the Ernie Bot, an AI-powered chatbot. Reuters reports.
During the презентации the company\’s chief executive Robin Li showed five videos. In them, Ernie Bot answers questions about The Three-Body Problem, performs mathematical calculations, understands Chinese dialects and creates videos and images from text prompts.
“Today’s announcement is a natural continuation of the hard work we have done over the past years,” Li said.
Baidu plans to use Ernie Bot to revolutionize its search engine, which currently dominates China. The company will also deploy the tool to boost efficiency in cloud computing, smart cars, consumer electronics, and other core businesses.
The company warned that the system has a number of issues.
“Of course, we can’t say that it is perfect. So why are we presenting it today? Because the market demands it,” Li said.
Ernie Bot is already available by invitation. Companies can apply to embed the bot in their products via Baidu’s cloud platform.
According to Li, 650 organisations have joined the Ernie ecosystem. Chinese state media and the Shaolin Temple were among the first to partner with the company.
In addition, Li commented on the recent GPT-4 announcement. He said the emergence of the model underscored the complexity of such technologies. The top executive was also surprised by the algorithm’s ability to generalise information.
He also cautioned against viewing chatbots through a geopolitical lens.
“Ernie Bot is not a tool of confrontation between China and the United States,” Li said.
The limited presentation of Ernie Bot with pre-recorded videos did not meet market expectations. Immediately after the presentation, Baidu’s shares listed in Hong Kong fell by 10%.
Earlier in March, OpenAI unveiled a large multimodal model GPT-4. On the same day, the company integrated the algorithm into its popular ChatGPT.