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Ernie Bot

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Ernie Bot
FamilyGenerative pre-trained transformer
DeveloperBaidu
Websiteyiyan.baidu.com Edit this at Wikidata

Ernie Bot (Chinese: 文心一言, Pinyin: wénxīn yīyán), full name Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,[1] is an AI chatbot service product of Baidu, released in 2023. It is built on a large language model called ERNIE, which has been in development since 2019. The latest version, ERNIE 4.0, was announced on October 17, 2023.[2]

History

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Ernie Bot was initially released for invited testing on March 16, 2023, based on "Ernie 3.0", a large language model that had been in development since 2019.[3][4] Ernie's so-called live release demo was reported to have been prerecorded, which caused Baidu's stock to drop 10 percent the same day.[5] The company's stock gained 14 percent on the next day after analysts from Citigroup and Bank of America tested Ernie Bot and gave it a preliminary thumbs-up.[6]

Ernie Bot was released to the public after receiving the green light from Chinese regulatory authorities on August 31, 2023.[7]

"Ernie 3.0", the language model, was trained with 10 billion parameters on a 4 terabyte (TB) corpus which consists of plain texts and a large-scale knowledge graph.[8] It was then updated to "Ernie 3.5" in June 2023, but it was "slightly inferior" to Open AI's GPT-4.[9] As a response, "Ernie 4.0" was unveiled in October and was released for paying subscribers in November of the same year.[10]

Baidu claimed that Ernie bot received more than 100 million users as of December 2023.[11][12] Ernie Bot's accumulated user base grew to 200 million as April 2024.[13]

In January 2024, Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Post reported that a university research lab linked to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) had tested Ernie Bot and iFlyTek's Spark for military response plans with scenarios involving the United States. After its listed stock in Hong Kong plunged by more than 11.5 percent, Baidu made an official statement denying the allegations.[11]

Ernie was integrated for the Chinese launch of Samsung's Galaxy S24 lineup.[14][15]

In June 2024, Baidu announced that Ernie Bot had reached 300 million users. The company also unveiled its latest foundation model, Ernie 4.0 Turbo, which boasts faster response times and improved performance.[16]

In September 2024, Baidu gave everyone using the app access to the 4.0 Turbo model and also announced it would change its Chinese name from "Wenxin Yiyan" (文心一言) to "Wenxiaoyan" (文小言) positioning itself as a search assistant.[17][18]

Training

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Ernie Bot is based on particular Ernie foundation models, including Ernie 3.0, Ernie 3.5, and Ernie 4.0. The training process starts from pre-training, learning from trillions of data points and billions of knowledge pieces. This was followed by refinement through supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning with human feedback, and prompt.[19]

Service

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In its subscription options, the professional plan gives users access to Ernie 4.0 with a payment either for a month or with reduced payment for auto-renewal per month. Meanwhile, Ernie 3.5 is free of charge.[20]

Ernie 4.0, the language model for Ernie bot, has information updated to April 2023.[10]

Censorship

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Ernie Bot is subject to the Chinese government's censorship regime.[21][22][23] In public tests with journalists, Ernie Bot refused to answer questions about Xi Jinping, the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, the persecution of Uyghurs in China in Xinjiang, and the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests.[22][24][25] When queried about the origin of COVID-19, Ernie Bot stated that it originated among American vape users.[22]

See also

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References

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  1. ^ Yang, Zeyi (2023-03-16). "Chinese tech giant Baidu just released its answer to ChatGPT". MIT Technology Review. Archived from the original on 2023-09-02. Retrieved 2023-03-24.
  2. ^ Mo, Yelin; Baptista, Eduardo (2023-10-17). "China's Baidu unveils new Ernie AI version to rival GPT-4". Reuters. Archived from the original on 2023-10-20. Retrieved 2023-10-20.
  3. ^ "Baidu's ChatGPT Rival Launches to Mixed Reviews". The Wall Street Journal. 16 March 2023. Archived from the original on 20 March 2023. Retrieved 17 March 2023.
  4. ^ "China's ChatGPT Black Market Is Thriving". Wired UK. March 7, 2023. Archived from the original on 2023-03-19. Retrieved 2023-03-17 – via www.wired.co.uk.
  5. ^ Mozur, Paul; Liu, John; Metz, Cade (2024-02-21). "China's Rush to Dominate A.I. Comes With a Twist: It Depends on U.S. Technology". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on 2024-02-21. Retrieved 2024-02-22. When Baidu introduced its chatbot, Ernie, in March, the "live" demonstration was revealed to be prerecorded. Baidu's stock plummeted 10 percent that day.
  6. ^ Toh, Michelle (March 17, 2023). "Baidu stock rebounds after falling sharply in wake of ChatGPT-style bot demo".
  7. ^ David, Emilia (2023-08-31). "Baidu launches Ernie chatbot after Chinese government approval". The Verge. Retrieved 2024-06-19.
  8. ^ Sun, Yu; Wang, Shuohuan; Feng, Shikun; Ding, Siyu; Pang, Chao; Shang, Junyuan; Liu, Jiaxiang; Chen, Xuyi; Zhao, Yanbin (2021-07-05). "ERNIE 3.0: Large-scale Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Language Understanding and Generation". arXiv:2107.02137 [cs.CL].
  9. ^ Che, Chang; Wang, Olivia (2023-07-14). "What Happens When You Ask a Chinese Chatbot About Taiwan?". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-03-09.
  10. ^ a b Gan, Michelle Toh, Nectar (2023-12-16). "We asked GPT-4 and Chinese rival ERNIE the same questions. Here's how they answered". CNN Business. Archived from the original on 2024-01-20. Retrieved 2024-01-20.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  11. ^ a b "Tech firm Baidu denies report that its Ernie AI chatbot is linked to Chinese military research". Associated Press. 2024-01-15. Archived from the original on 2024-01-20. Retrieved 2024-01-20. The academic paper from the PLA Information Engineering University detailed how researchers had given Ernie Bot prompts to generate simulated military response plans for Libyan troops in response to a U.S. military attack.
  12. ^ Cheng, Evelyn (2023-12-29). "Baidu says its ChatGPT rival Ernie bot now has more than 100 million users". CNBC. Archived from the original on 2024-01-19. Retrieved 2024-01-20.
  13. ^ Ye, Josh (April 15, 2024). "Baidu says AI chatbot 'Ernie Bot' has attracted 200 million users". Reuters.
  14. ^ Chiang, Sheila (2024-01-26). "Baidu's Ernie AI chatbot to power Samsung's new Galaxy S24 smartphones". CNBC. Archived from the original on 2024-02-22. Retrieved 2024-02-22.
  15. ^ Porter, Jon (2024-01-26). "Samsung's new phones replace Google AI with Baidu in China". The Verge. Archived from the original on 2024-02-22. Retrieved 2024-02-22.
  16. ^ Mo, Liam (June 28, 2024). "Baidu launches upgraded AI model, says Ernie Bot hits 300 mln users". Reuters. Retrieved June 28, 2024.
  17. ^ Ben Jiang (2024-09-04). "Baidu rebrands flagship AI chatbot to stand out from rivals". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 2024-09-12.
  18. ^ "百度推出新搜索文小言". 第一财经 (in Simplified Chinese). 2024-09-04. Retrieved 2024-09-12.
  19. ^ "Baidu Research". research.baidu.com. Retrieved 2024-06-20.
  20. ^ "Baidu launches paid version of Ernie Bot as firms look to cash in on AI chatbots". South China Morning Post. 2023-11-01. Archived from the original on 2024-01-20. Retrieved 2024-01-20.
  21. ^ McDonell, Stephen (2023-09-08). "Elusive Ernie: China's new chatbot has a censorship problem". BBC News. Archived from the original on 2023-09-09. Retrieved 2023-09-10.
  22. ^ a b c "Meet Ernie, China's answer to ChatGPT". The Economist. 3 September 2023. ISSN 0013-0613. Archived from the original on 2023-09-03. Retrieved 2023-09-03. On matters of politics, by contrast, the chatbot is rather quiet. Ernie is confused by questions such as "Who is China's president?" and will tell you the name of Xi Jinping's mother, but not those of his siblings. It draws a blank if asked about the drawbacks of socialism. It often attempts to redirect sensitive conversations by saying: "Let's talk about something else." Ernie's reticence will come as no shock to Chinese users familiar with a heavily censored internet.
  23. ^ Feng, Emily (May 29, 2024). "Why China, and now Taiwan, are making their own chatbots using their own data". NPR. Retrieved May 29, 2024. ERNIE, developed by Chinese internet company Baidu. But ERNIE has to follow Chinese censorship rules and political mores, including, for example, saying in answers that Taiwan is part of China - because only training a model on data from China could make a pro-China LLM.
  24. ^ Baptista, Eduardo (2023-03-20). "Baidu's Ernie writes poems but says it has insufficient information on Xi, tests show". Reuters. Archived from the original on 2023-09-02. Retrieved 2023-09-02.
  25. ^ "'Talk About Something Else': Chinese AI Chatbot Toes Party Line". Voice of America. Agence France-Presse. 2023-08-31. Archived from the original on 2023-09-02. Retrieved 2023-09-01. The app is highly censored, offering state-approved answers to taboo questions and sometimes refusing to process them altogether when AFP tested the service.
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