​Chinese company claims to have a chatbot that is superior to ChatGPT in some ways

The logo of tech company Baidu appears on an advertising screen.

According to Reuters, in a statement on June 27, Baidu said Ernie 3.5, the latest version of the Ernie model equipped with artificial intelligence (AI), surpassed ChatGPT in terms of comprehensive ability score and surpassed GPT-4 software in some Chinese language-related abilities.

Baidu cited an experiment conducted by China Science Daily using datasets including AGIEval and C-Eval, two benchmarks used to evaluate the performance of AI models.

Baidu's announcement comes as the global AI buzz sparked by ChatGPT has spread to China, prompting a slew of local companies to announce competing products.

In March, Baidu became the first major Chinese tech company to launch an AI chatbot to compete with ChatGPT. Ernie Bot, built on Baidu’s Ernie 3.0 AI model, has been in testing for the past three months.

Besides Baidu, other major Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba Group and Tencent, have also unveiled their respective AI models.

Baidu said the new AI engine achieves better inference and training efficiency, allowing for faster and less expensive iterations in the future. Baidu also said the new model will support external “plugins.”

Plugins are additional applications that enable Baidu's AI to work in specific situations like summarizing long texts and generating more accurate answers.
Also in March, ChatGPT rolled out plugin support.

The AI ​​chatbot Q&A software made headlines around the world when ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI (USA), was launched in November 2022. Since then, the tool has attracted 100 million users, setting a record as the fastest growing application. The AI-powered tool is smart enough to pass entrance exams to law and medical schools.

In a commentary in February, cybersecurity expert MH Homaei noted that the AI ​​software poses “a number of security risks that organizations must be aware of to protect sensitive data and reputations.” The effectiveness of the chatbot depends on customers providing it with valuable data, which can make it vulnerable to information leaks. On March 26, OpenAI revealed that some of its users’ personal and payment information was briefly exposed due to a system error.

According to Tin Tuc Newspaper