Baidu’s Ernie 3.5 AI Beats OpenAI’s ChatGPT On Multiple Performance Measures
Baidu Inc, the top search engine provider in China, announced that its latest version of ChatGPT-style service has outperformed the highly popular OpenAI chatbot, which is backed by Microsoft, on various significant metrics.
Baidu said in a statement on Tuesday that Ernie 3.5, the latest version of its Ernie AI model, had surpassed “ChatGPT in comprehensive ability scores” and surpassed “GPT-4 in several Chinese features.”
The Beijing-based company cited a test conducted by state newspaper China Science Daily using datasets including AGIEval and C-Eval, two benchmarks used to evaluate the performance of AI models.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment outside regular business hours.
Baidu’s announcement comes amid a global AI push launched by ChatGPT that has spread to China and prompted a number of domestic companies to launch competing products.
Baidu was the first major Chinese tech company to introduce an AI product to rival ChatGPT when it unveiled its tongue-in-cheek AI Ernie Bot in March. Built on Baidu’s older Ernie 3.0 AI model, Ernie Bot has been in invite-only testing for the past three months.
Other major Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, have all since unveiled their respective AI designs.
Baidu said its new model has better training and inference efficiency, allowing for faster and cheaper iterations in the future. Baidu also said its new model supports external “plugins”.
Plugins are add-ons that allow Baidu’s AI to work in more advanced scenarios, such as long text summarization and generating more specific answers.
ChatGPT introduced extension support in March.
