Baidu's AI bot Ernie 3.5 head-to-head with ChatGPT

A brand-new Chinese AI chatbot has entered the competition for supremacy in artificial intelligence (AI) products with tech behemoths like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. A Chinese multinational, Baidu, asserted that its ChatGPT-like chatbot outperformed OpenAI's most recent human-like bot in terms of performance.

Baidu stated Tuesday that Ernie 3.5, the latest version of its Ernie AI model, had surpassed "ChatGPT in comprehensive ability scores and outperformed GPT-4 in several Chinese capabilities."

The AI race has gotten more competitive since Microsoft-backed startup OpenAI released its sophisticated chatbot that can respond in a language that resembles that of a human.

As the product was launched, it posed severe competition to other technology giants, forcing them to jump into the race and incorporate AI-powered products into their services.

While citing a test that was run by the Chinese newspaper China Science Daily, there were datasets including AGIEval and C-Eval, two benchmarks used to evaluate the performance of AI models.

The Baidu announcement comes amid a global AI buzz kicked off by ChatGPT that has spread to China, prompting a flurry of domestic companies to announce rival products.

Baidu was the first big Chinese tech company to launch an AI product to rival ChatGPT when it unveiled its language AI Ernie Bot in March.

Ernie Bot, built on Baidu's older Ernie 3.0 AI model, has been in invite-only tests for the past three months.

Other big Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba Group and Tencent, have also developed their own AI models.

Baidu said: "Its new model comes with better training and inference efficiency, which positions it for faster and cheaper iterations in the future, adding that "the new model would support external plugins".

Plugins are additional applications that will allow Baidu's AI to work on more specific scenarios, such as summarising long texts and generating more precise answers.