BEIJING, June 27 (TMTPost)—Baidu chairman and CEO Robin Li, or Li Yanhong, revealed the Chinese tech giant has made more progress on artificial intelligence (AI) model.

Credit: Visual China

“Big (AI) models is very popular at the moment, but four year ago, when it had not received widespread attention, Baidu had released its model Ernie 1.0, and since then updated to 2.0 and 3.0 version. Nowadays, the training speed of Ernie 3.5 has doubled the previous 3.0 version, its inference 17 times faster than 3.0, and the accumulative performance increased by 50%,” Li said, in his keynote speech titled Large Pretrained Model Reshaping the Digital World at the WIC (World Internet Conference) Nishan Dialogue on Digital Civilization, earlier this week. Ernie 3.5 is not only a technical upgrade but also a security one, and it has a wide range of significant improvements, from data quality, generation effect to content safety, Li stressed at the government-backed forum.

According to Li, large pretrained models are currently the focus of global technological innovation and the main battlefield of global AI competitions. "The key point of the new worldwide competition strategy is not how many large models a country has, but how many native AI applications your large models boast, and to what extent these applications have improved production efficiency,” Li noted. ”If we can squeeze ourselves into the crowded game table and obtain entry tickets, China will have a stronger digital industry, and the digital economy will scare up tremendously."

Li highlighted the AI governance challenge brought by big AI models should not be overlooked. “If we steer the road of AI development safely and responsibly, the big model will reshape the digital world, and AI can provide an economic boom for China, and even the whole world, and improve the well-being of humanity,” Li remarked.

Baidu officially launched Ernie 3.0-powered chatbot Ernie Bot on March 16, a day after OpenAI released the multimodal pre-training large model GPT-4. Ernie Bot enables to generate texts and integrate other capabilities of Baidu in the field of AI, such as the ability to create pictures, and the ability to automatically generate videos according to the copywriting, which can generate content with pictures.

At an earnings call last month, Robin Li said Baidu planned to steadily incorporate into all of its businesses, and was rapidly integrating Ernie Bot into all the businesses for testing. The efforts he mentioned include a beta-test for an upgraded version of Baidu Search, which is powered by Ernie Bot, and testing the integration of the bot with Baidu Wenku, an online document-sharing platform, to enable the bot to work alongside users and assist with searching, summarizing, and generating content using natural language.

Li said his company will make an overhaul across its products with AI in a speech delivered right after the earnings call in late May. “There is a saying in the industry that each product is worth of reproduction as the era of big models comes, but who really redo (the product)? Baidu wants to be the first company to remake all the products, which means to re-work and reorganize, rather than to integrate into or open access to,” stated Li. He believed Baidu proved itself as a leader for launch of the Ernie Bot. “Such a quick release resulted from the long-term accumulation and investment,” Li said. “We have consistently updated the big model Ernie to 2.0 and 3.0 version since inception of its 1.0 version back to 2019, and we will soon roll out Ernie 3.5.”

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