Baidu launches new AI model Ernie 4, setting stage for rivalry with OpenAI's GPT-4
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Chinese internet search giant Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) on Tuesday unveiled its latest generative artificial intelligence (AI) model Ernie 4.0, a potential rival to OpenAI's GPT-4 model.
Baidu's Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO Robin Li introduced Ernie 4.0 and other AI applications at the company's annual flagship event Baidu World 2023.
"ERNIE 4.0 has achieved a full upgrade with drastically improved performance in understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory," said Li in a press release provided to Seeking Alpha by the company.
Baidu's stock dipped ~2% premarket, and so did JD.com (JD), while Bilibili (BILI) and Alibaba (NYSE:BABA) were down ~1% on Tuesday.
Li showcased Ernie Bot's capabilities, powered by Ernie 4.0, which included â to understand and provide answers to complex and disorganized human requests, interpret hidden messages; Generate content, including text, images, and videos; Reason, by solving geometry problems; and to Memorize and integrate incremental inputs, which was shown by writing a short story and regularly adding new information it was in the process of writing the story.
Baidu added that Ernie 4.0 is now accessible to invited users on Ernie Bot, and the API will be available upon application to enterprise clients via Qianfan foundation model platform.
The Chinese company also said that is adopting an AI-native approach to re-build its suite of apps and products, including Baidu Search, Baidu GBI, Infoflow, Baidu Wenku, Baidu Drive and Baidu Maps.
Baidu GBI, which the company calls China's first generative business intelligent solution, can quickly execute data inquiries, output business analytics, and provide results via text and graph summaries. Meanwhile with the addition of YunYiduo to Baidu Drive, users can now use text prompts or voice prompts to retrieve files, images, videos, and more formats, even for very specific requests.
In Baidu Maps, the integrated AI guide will take the initiative to suggest next step of action to users during their trip, according to the company.
In August, Baidu (BIDU) was expected to be among the first to win approval from China's internet watchdog for AI services to be released for public, thereby opening space for the domestic players to compete with large language models, or LLMs, from the likes of Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI, and others.
Baidu had launched the chatbot called ErnieBot powered by Ernie in March.
Last week China proposed security requirements for companies providing services powered by AI which included a blacklist of sources that cannot be used to train the AI models, according to a report from Reuters.
Generative AI services have taken the world by storm, since the launch of Microsoft (MSFT)- backed OpenAI's ChatGPT last year. Companies have launched their own LLMs which can provide services such as content and image generation, to name a few.
Alphabet's (GOOG) (GOOGL) unit Google's Bard, Alibaba's (BABA) Tongyi Qianwen and Tongyi Wanxiang, OpenAI's text-to-image AI tool DALLÂ·E 3, Meta Platforms' (META) AudioCraft, SeamlessM4T, and Llama 2, and Getty Images' (GETY) model called Generative AI by Getty Images, are some of them.

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