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Well known chinese search engine Baidu’s CEO Robin Li said on Friday that the company will, in a matter of time officially launch Ernie 3.5, a generative AI large-language model that will power Baidu’s ChatGPT-like app Ernie Bot and upgrade its search engine. Li made the announcement at the Zhongguancun Forum, one of China’s widely known technology forums, around two months after Ernie Bot was first shown to the public to mixed reviews.
From then onwards, Ernie Bot and other products powered by the company’s generative AI large-language model have remained in trial mode, with a select number of companies and users invited to test the products and provide feedback. Earlier this month, Baidu announced that its experience in tailoring its search engine to Chinese regulatory requirements makes it confident its AI-driven chatbot won’t make mistakes on “important and sensitive topics” . On a call with analysts, Baidu CEO Li said the company was waiting for government approval before launching its ChatGPT-like Ernie bot, which Reuters tests have found refuses to answer a wide range of questions on politics, particularly those pertaining to Chinese government leaders. “For important and sensitive topics, we have to make sure artificial intelligence will not hallucinate,” Li said, using the industry term for when AI models generate outputs different from what is expected.
In the previous month, Baidu also filed lawsuits against “relevant” app developers and Apple over fake copies of its Ernie bot app available on Apple’s App Store. The company said it had lodged multiple lawsuits in Beijing Haidian People’s Court against the developers that worked in the counterfeit applications of its Ernie bot and the Apple company. “At present, Ernie does not have any official app,” Baidu said in a statement late on Friday posted on its official “Baidu AI” WeChat account.