Baidu Makes ERNIE Generative AI Available to All
Baidu has recently launched ERNIE Bot, its advanced AI language model and generative AI product, making it accessible to the public through different app stores and its official website. In addition to ERNIE, Baidu intends to introduce a series of AI applications that aim to provide users with a comprehensive experience of generative AI’s four fundamental capabilities: comprehension, generation, reasoning, and memory.
Opening the ERNIE Bot (which focuses on the Chinese market) to the public will allow Baidu to get much more human feedback, according to CEO Robin Li. The company notes that this will help it iterate on the ERNIE Bot faster and improve the user experience.
Baidu announced the chatbot in March, showing off capabilities such as a sci-fi novel summary and suggestions for continuing the story in an expanded universe. It can also generate images and videos based on text inputs. Earlier this month, Baidu said that the ERNIE Bot’s training capacity had tripled since March, and that it can now analyze and visualize data, produce results faster and process image feeds.
As of August 15, Chinese companies must obtain approval from authorities before releasing generative AI experiences to the public, and Baidu was one of the first to get the green light, according to Bloomberg. The report suggests that officials see AI as a “business and political necessity due to the transformative nature of the technology”. Beijing is said to want the guardrails in place to keep content firmly firmly firmly in place while allowing Chinese companies to compete with their foreign rivals.
