Baidu Unveils ERNIE Bot, the Latest Generative AI Mastering Chinese Language and Multi-Modal Generation

– ERNIE Bot is a new generation Large Language Model (LLM) and Generative AI product developed by Baidu.

– The AI ​​product demonstrates proficiency in five generative use cases: literary creation, business writing, mathematical computation, Chinese language understanding, and multimodal generation.

– Beginning March 16, 2023ERNIE Bot will be accessible to invited users, and the API will be available to enterprise customers via Baidu AI Cloud upon request.

– In the first two hours after the press conference, more than 30,000 enterprise users applied for access to the ERNIE Bot Enterprise Edition API.

BEIJING, March 16, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU and HKEX: 9888) (“Baidu” or the “Company”), a leading AI company with a strong internet foundation, today introduced ERNIE Bot, a new generation large language model (LLM) and generative AI product. ERNIE Bot excels in a number of areas including understanding Chinese language and culture, creating literary and business texts, performing complex mathematical calculations, and creating multimodal content. The AI ​​product can understand human intentions and provide accurate, logical, and fluent responses that are close to human level.

starting March 16, 2023, ERNIE Bot will be opened for a first group of users with invite codes and will be made available to more users soon. Baidu also provides access to the ERNIE Bot API via Baidu AI Cloud, allowing enterprise customers to request and leverage the platform’s advanced language capabilities. Since February, over 650 companies have joined the ERNIE Bot ecosystem.

Big language models and generative AI represent a new technological paradigm and offer an opportunity that no global company can afford to miss. ERNIE Bot is positioned as an essential AI-enabling platform designed to facilitate intelligent transformations in various industries such as finance, energy, media and public affairs. Robin LiCo-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Baidu said, “Baidu envisions a future where we unite with everyone to advance the development of AI, empower everyone with access to cutting-edge productivity tools, and ensure the benefits of these.” Progress is shared by all.”

Try ERNIE Bot at:

https://yiyan.baidu.com/

Apply for the ERNIE Bot API at:

https://cloud.baidu.com/survey_summit/wenxin.html?track=C109067&track=4016a6e2daa72dd8f416b6eba17830b31f1db02567e779da

Watch the full press conference recording at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukvEUI3x0vI

You can access ERNIE Bot’s multimedia assets at:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1j2W3nxluD5HCRLMNHXLk61oF4MRxNYnH

Transform productivity tools

At the press conference unveiling ERNIE Bot in Beijing, Robin Li presented his achievement in five scenarios: literary creation, business writing, mathematical calculations, understanding of the Chinese language, and multimodal generation.

• Literary work: ERNIE Bot summarized the main contents of the popular Chinese science fiction novel, The three body problem. It proposed five viewpoints for potential story expansion based on dialogue questions, demonstrating its extensive expertise in dialogue, analysis, and content generation, as well as objectivity and reasoning supported by inherent graphs of knowledge.
• Business Correspondence: A versatile business copywriter, ERNIE Bot has demonstrated his ability to build a brand from scratch, which included tasks such as designing a name for a company, creating an engaging brand slogan, and writing press releases. This high-level creative capacity is possible because ERNIE Bot has been trained on trillions of web pages, tens of billions of search and image data, hundreds of billions of daily language data, and a knowledge graph of 550 billion facts.
• Mathematical calculation: ERNIE Bot also possesses a certain level of cognitive abilities that enable it to master relatively complex tasks such as mathematical deduction and logical reasoning. With classic puzzles like the chicken and rabbit in the same cage problem that tests human logical thinking, ERNIE Bot can understand the meaning of the question, come up with a correct approach and follow the right steps to surrender with the correct answer.
• Chinese language comprehension: ERNIE Bot demonstrates unparalleled natural language processing (NLP) skills in Chinese, which is reflected in its understanding of the Chinese language and cultural nuances. In a demo, ERNIE Bot explained the meaning behind the idiom “Paper is expensive in Luoyang,” which alludes to the high demand for paper due to the popularity of poetry. ERNIE Bot explained the economic theory behind the idiom – the law of supply and demand – and created a poem that includes the idiom’s four Chinese characters as the first word of each line.
• Multimodal generation: ERNIE Bot can produce text, images, audio and video at a text prompt and is even able to recognize speech in multiple local dialects such as French Sichuan Dialect. The video generation capabilities of ERNIE Bot are not yet available to all users due to the relatively high cost.

“Multimodality is an undeniable future trend for generative AI,” he said Robin Li. “In the future, ERNIE Bot’s multimodal generation capabilities will continue to evolve as we continue to refine Baidu’s unified large-scale multimodal model.”

Despite the capabilities of ERNIE Bot, LLMs of this type are far from perfect. Continuous improvement based on real-world feedback remains essential.

“Once we launch ERNIE Bot,” Li noted, “we will set up a mechanism where real-world user feedback, developer calls, and model iterations work together to improve the model more effectively and efficiently.”

Technology fundamentals of ERNIE Bot

ERNIE Bot is the result of Baidu’s years of research and industry practices, Baidu said Haifeng Wang, CTO of Baidu. This new generation knowledge-based LLM is based on Baidu’s proprietary models ERNIE (Enhanced Representation of Knowledge Integration) and PLATO (Pre-trained Dialogue Generation Model). Since its release in 2019, ERNIE has evolved from a model for understanding natural language to a model platform with cross-language, modal, cross-industry and cross-task capabilities.

Baidu trained ERNIE Bot with Supervised Fine-Tuning, Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, Instant Learning, Knowledge Augmentation, Retrieval Augmentation, and Dialogue Augmentation.

Robin Li, stressed Baidu’s unique position as one of the few companies in the world to offer a full AI stack at the press conference. These include the AI ​​chip Kunlun, the deep learning framework PaddlePaddle, the pre-trained model ERNIE, and a variety of applications such as search, AI cloud, autonomous driving, and Xiaodu smart devices.

Li stressed that the advantage of Baidu’s full AI stack lies in its ability to achieve end-to-end optimization, which greatly increases efficiency. The synergy between framework and model reduces costs and optimizes model development. Baidu’s PaddlePaddle framework was used in the development of 4D hybrid parallel technology, which greatly improves the efficiency of training and inference for mega-scale models. Baidu’s full AI stack will enable a closed system where each layer can provide feedback, which will help ERNIE Bot to keep iterating and improving.

New Business Opportunities

Li predicted that LLMs will pave the way for three new business opportunities: cloud computing companies offering Model-as-a-Service solutions, companies focused on fine-tuning industry-specific models, and companies focused on LLMs create based applications.

Baidu AI Cloud will soon launch cloud services and application products based on ERNIE Bot, including public cloud and privatized deployment, Li said.

“ERNIE Bot is not a tool for China-US technology confrontation. It’s a product of generations of Baidu engineers who pursue the dream of technology changing the world. It’s a brand new platform that enables us to serve hundreds of millions of users and empower thousands of industries, and a strong example of innovation-driven development,” he said Robin Li At the conference. “We believe artificial intelligence (AI) will revolutionize every industry we know today. The immense long-term value of AI and its transformative impact on all aspects of life is still in its infancy. The future holds numerous groundbreaking applications and products, as well as many more milestones.”

About Baidu

Founded in 2000, Baidu’s mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Baidu is a leading AI company with a strong internet base, trading on NASDAQ as ‘BIDU’ and on HKEX as ‘9888’. One Baidu ADS represents eight Class A common shares.

Media contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Baidu, Inc.