The company describes itself as one of the leading providers of artificial intelligence.
(Photo: REUTERS)
Beijing, Dusseldorf China’s largest search engine operator Baidu presented its intelligent chatbot “Ernie Bot” on Thursday. Market participants had expected a live demonstration, but Baidu boss Robin Li only presented the innovation as a video.
Initially, only a select group of business partners can test the new application. It is not yet known when it will be made available to other users. Li acknowledged that the application is “not perfect yet.” Nevertheless, he wanted to introduce Ernie Bot as soon as possible “because the market demands it”. The group’s share price temporarily lost around ten percent on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
Competitive pressure from Microsoft
The company OpenAI ensures innovation pressure in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in the tech industry. The US start-up released the chat program ChatGPT in November 2022, which can create texts like those written by humans. Microsoft is involved in OpenAI and integrates the AI system GPT into its search engine Bing. The group also wants to announce new applications on Thursday.
This forces competitors to react quickly. In February, Google, like Baidu, only showed a demo video of its intelligent chatbot “Bard”, which also triggered a price slide. In response, Baidu announced that it would accelerate the introduction of Ernie Bot in order to keep up with US search engine providers Google and Microsoft.
Experts consider the technology to be disruptive. ChatGPT processes user questions in natural language and generates answers. This changes user behavior on the Internet, for example, search queries are made in well-formulated sentences. However, the AI applications do not work error-free, answers can be wrong. On Wednesday, OpenAI presented an improved version that is said to be less vulnerable.
Backlog demand for English-language content
Baidu is the first Chinese tech company to present a comparable program. However, since there is only one video so far, a comparison with ChatGPT is difficult. Baidu boss Li admits that there is still some catching up to do when it comes to English-language content. However, when it comes to processing Chinese-language data, Ernie Bot is a leader, he stressed. Since Baidu focuses on the Chinese market, this is crucial. In the future, however, the program will also be increasingly fed with English-language data.
Baidu CEO Robin Li introduced the AI chatbot “Ernie Bot” in a video presentation on Thursday. Investors reacted disappointed.
(Photo: AP)
OpenAI has so far been regarded as a technological leader. However, ChatGPT is not available in China and can only be used via special tunnel software. It is noticeable that the quality of the answers to inquiries in Chinese is significantly worse than to comparable inquiries in English.
The reason for this is that ChatGPT was mainly fed with English-language training data. This highlights the challenge for AI models trained on specific speech datasets. In addition, in China, AI-generated content is censored just like traditional and social media. It is still unclear whether and to what extent this will affect technological development.
China’s Minister of Science and Technology, Wang Zhigang, emphasized the importance of AI at the People’s Congress, but also pointed out the challenges for Chinese companies. It’s “about dribbling and shooting, but Messi’s success is not that easy to achieve,” he said.
China’s government relies on AI
As early as 2015, the Chinese government declared AI to be a future technology in which domestic companies should play at the top of the world. In the AI index of the US elite university Stanford, which evaluates global progress in the areas of research, development and economy, China comes in second, just behind the USA. In some areas, the People’s Republic is even ahead.
However, there are different focal points in research. According to an analysis by the AI knowledge platform Zeta Alpha, when it comes to artificial intelligence, China works heavily in the field of image recognition, while the US focuses on text recognition.
Baidu describes itself as one of the leading AI providers. There is no other company in China that can compete with Baidu in natural language processing, the company confidently explains. The group has invested billions in research into AI in recent years and is driving future technologies such as quantum computers and autonomous driving.
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