China's Baidu claims the latest version of its Ernie Bot outperforms OpenAI's ChatGPT.
As Bloomberg reports, Ernie 3.5 is the latest version of Baidu's chatbot, which has apparently "surpassed ChatGPT in multiple test sets." More specifically, Ernie 3.5 surpasses ChatGPT 3.5 in general abilities, but also outperforms OpenAI's more advanced GPT-4 large multimodal model in several Chinese-language capabilities.
The tests were performed using the AGIEval human-centric benchmark "specifically designed to evaluate the general abilities of foundation models in tasks pertinent to human cognition and problem-solving," and the C-Eval multi-level multi-discipline Chinese evaluation suite for foundation models.
Ernie Bot was first revealed back in March, but the pre-recorded launch presentation did little to impress and saw Baidu's share price tank. In the world of AI, three months is clearly a long time, and Baidu has quickly caught up with its rivals. According to China Science Daily, Baidu managed to increase the efficiency of its chatbot's training and inference process, meaning Ernie's rate of improvement will be faster in future.
Despite the US government's attempts to restrict China's access to the most advanced semiconductor equipment and products, Chinese companies are clearly finding a way to keep up, at least in the area of artificial intelligence. However, that could change now that both the Dutch and Japanese governments decided to join the US in restricting exports to China.