Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, speaks during the company’s Create conference in Shenzhen, China, on April 16, 2024.
Bloomberg | Bloomberg | fake images
SHENZHEN, China – A year after Chinese search engine operator Baidu launched its ChatGPT-like Ernie bot, the company this week announced tools to encourage locals to develop artificial intelligence applications.
“Today, China has one billion Internet users, strong basic models, sufficient AI application scenarios, and the most complete industrial system in the world,” said CEO Robin Li in his keynote speech at the annual conference. of Baidu AI developers on Tuesday.
“Anyone can be a developer,” he said in Mandarin, according to a CNBC translation.
While many point out that China is behind the United States in artificial intelligence capabilities, others emphasize that the strength of the Chinese market lies more in technological application. Take next-day e-commerce and 30-minute food delivery, for example.
Baidu’s recently announced AI tools allow people with no coding knowledge to create AI-powered generative chatbots for specific functions, which can then be integrated into a website, Baidu search engine results, or others. online portals. This is different from a similar tool called GPT that OpenAI launched earlier this year, as those custom chatbots, for everything from suggesting movies to fixing code, live within the ChatGPT interface.
Baidu’s basic tools are generally available to try for free, up to a certain usage limit, similar to some of Google’s cloud and AI features. OpenAI charges a monthly fee for the latest version of ChatGPT and the ability to use it for software. The older model ChatGPT 3.5 is free to use, but without access to custom GPTs.
Baidu also announced this week three new versions of its Ernie AI model, called “Speed”, “Lite” and “Tiny”, which coders can selectively access, depending on the complexity of the task.
“It seems that their focus is on building the entire native AI development ecosystem, providing a complete set of development tools and platform solutions,” said Bo Du, managing director of WestSummit Capital Management. This is according to a CNBC translation of the Chinese comments.
Baidu said this week that the Ernie bot has amassed more than 200 million users since its launch in March last year and that computer programs access the underlying AI model 200 million times a day. The company said more than 85,000 business customers have used its AI cloud platform to create 190,000 AI applications.
Many of the use cases Baidu showed off this week focused on consumer-facing applications: tourism and content creation like picture books and meeting scheduling.
In a demo room, Baidu’s business departments showed how AI tools could be integrated with virtual people conducting live broadcasts or driving search engine traffic to an AI-based interactive shopping guide.
Buysmart.AI, which won Baidu’s artificial intelligence competition last year, uses the technology as an online shopping assistant connected to Chinese social media platform Weibo. The startup said it is using ChatGPT for a standalone interactive e-commerce app in the US.
“Personally, I think Ernie 4.0 understands Chinese better than ChatGPT 3.5,” Buysmart.AI co-founder Andy Qiu said in an interview. That’s according to a CNBC translation of his comments in Mandarin.
US consumers are currently more interested in AI products than users in China, Qiu said. But she said that, overall, there is still room for improvement when it comes to building trust in consumer AI assistants and convincing users to place an order.
Also on display was a humanoid robot developed by Shenzhen-based UBTech Robotics, which used Baidu’s Ernie AI model to understand commands and read written words.
It is not immediately clear how these AI applications can significantly change business at this time. But Baidu is the latest to implement more tools to make it easier and cheaper for people to experiment with them.
Customer service, voice assistants and Internet-connected devices can use smaller AI models to quickly respond to users, said Helen Chai, CEO of CIC Consulting.
He added that in scenarios such as legal consultations or medical diagnoses, small AI models can be trained with specific data to achieve performance comparable to larger AI models.
In the future, large AI-based applications will rely on a mix of models, said Baidu CEO Li, using the technical term “mix of experts,” or MoE.
He also promoted Baidu’s capabilities in AI-produced code, one of the areas where Silicon Valley tech companies see the greatest potential for generative AI.
Baidu said that since it deployed its AI coding assistant “Comate” a year ago, the tool has contributed to 27% of the tech company’s newly generated code. Audio streaming app Ximalaya, IT services company iSoftStone and Shanghai Mitsubishi Elevator are among the more than 10,000 corporate users of Comate and have adopted nearly half of the code generated by the tool, according to Baidu.
The global rush to develop generative AI has created a shortage of semiconductors needed to provide computing power. Chinese companies face additional limitations due to US restrictions on chip exports.
Baidu did not specifically discuss the shortage of computing power during the main session of the conference. In his speech, Dou Shen, head of AI cloud at Baidu, pointed out “uncertainties” in the chip supply chain and announced that Baidu has a platform that can tap into the power of several different types of chips.
In February, Li said on an earnings call that Baidu’s stockpile of AI chips “allows us to continue improving Ernie over the next one to two years.” The company will release first quarter results on May 16.
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