Baidu’s ERNIE Bot: A New Era in Generative AI
Chinese tech giant Baidu has announced that its generative AI product ERNIE Bot is now open to the public through various app stores and its website.
What is ERNIE Bot?
ERNIE Bot is a powerful deep learning model that can generate text, images, and videos based on natural language inputs. It is powered by ERNIE, a cutting-edge technology that combines both text and knowledge graph data.
History of ERNIE
The first version of ERNIE was introduced and open-sourced in 2019 by researchers at Tsinghua University to demonstrate the natural language understanding capabilities of a model that combines both text and knowledge graph data.
In 2020, Baidu released ERNIE 2.0, which set a new record by achieving a score higher than 90 on the GLUE benchmark for evaluating natural language understanding systems.
In 2021, Baidu’s researchers published a paper on ERNIE 3.0, which claimed that the model exceeds human performance on the SuperGLUE natural language benchmark. ERNIE 3.0 set a new top score on SuperGLUE and displaced efforts from Google and Microsoft.
What can ERNIE Bot do?
According to Baidu’s CEO Robin Li, opening up ERNIE Bot to the public will enable the company to obtain more human feedback and improve the user experience. He said that ERNIE Bot is a showcase of the four core abilities of generative AI: understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory.
ERNIE Bot can help users with various tasks such as writing, learning, entertainment, and work. For example, it can summarise a sci-fi novel and offer suggestions on how to continue the story in an expanded universe. It can also generate images and videos based on text inputs, such as creating a portrait of a fictional character or a scene from a movie.
Beijing’s AI Guardrails
Beijing is keen on putting guardrails in place to prevent the spread of harmful or illegal content while still enabling Chinese companies to compete with overseas rivals in the field of AI.
The “guardrails” include the rules published by the Chinese authorities in July 2023 that govern generative AI in China. These rules cover various aspects of generative AI, such as content, data, technology, fairness, and licensing.
One notable requirement is that operators of generative AI must ensure that their services adhere to the core values of socialism, while also avoiding content that incites subversion of state power, secession, terrorism, or any actions undermining national unity and social stability.
Generative AI services within China are also prohibited from promoting content that provokes ethnic hatred and discrimination, violence, obscenity, or false and harmful information.
Conclusion
ERNIE Bot is a powerful tool that can help users with various tasks, and its open-sourcing will enable more human feedback and improvement of the user experience. However, it is crucial to ensure that the technology is used in a responsible and ethical manner, as Beijing’s guardrails aim to achieve.
FAQs
Q: What is ERNIE Bot?
A: ERNIE Bot is a generative AI product that can generate text, images, and videos based on natural language inputs.
Q: What is the history of ERNIE?
A: The first version of ERNIE was introduced and open-sourced in 2019 by researchers at Tsinghua University, and subsequent versions have achieved remarkable results in natural language understanding benchmarks.
Q: What can ERNIE Bot do?
A: ERNIE Bot can help users with various tasks such as writing, learning, entertainment, and work.
Q: What are the Beijing’s AI guardrails?
A: The Beijing’s AI guardrails include rules published in July 2023 that govern generative AI in China, covering aspects such as content, data, technology, fairness, and licensing.
