Chinese ChatGPT competitor claims it can beat GPT-4

Chinese company Baidu is making the lofty claim that it has managed to best ChatGPT 3.5 and 4 in multiple ways.

Baidu Inc., a Chinese technology conglomerate has announced that it believes its ChatGPT competitor, Ernie Bot, can now outperform OpenAI’s software.

This follows another Chinese AI development house, iFlytek, which believed that its own generative AI model would surpass ChatGPT in a few months.

The current version of Baidu’s bot, Ernie 3.5, is being claimed to best GPT 3.5, which powers the free version of OpenAI’s chatbot. In an announcement post, Baidu said:

“… We have improved the reasoning of ERNIE 3.5 in logical reasoning, mathematical computation, and code generation…”

This has been done through a method of training that includes a “combination of coarse-grained and fine-grained semantic knowledge”. In other words, they’ve fed it a massive variety of data in multiple formats.

Ernie Bot is also getting ChatGPT-styled plugins, bringing it up to speed with the competition.

Ernie Bot now bests ChatGPT in Chinese

OpenAI

However, there’s a huge caveat to the news when it comes to besting GPT-4.

GPT-4 is OpenAI’s current engine for things like Bing AI and ChatGPT Plus. It has a far more sophisticated way of constructing things when prompted. However, it is still running afoul of misinformation.

The main point of contention between GPT-4 and Ernie Bot is that the Chinese bot can supposedly outperform ChatGPT running GPT-4 in Chinese. However, this hasn’t been detailed outside of being much more creative than before.

Where it seems that Baidu has improved Ernie Bot through its training. This has seen a more efficient method being used, with Baidu also claiming that they’ve managed to shrink the cost.

However, due to the ongoing tensions between China and the US, sanctions have restricted the hardware needed to properly train the bots.

While not available worldwide just yet, the initial reaction to Ernie Bot wasn’t comparable to ChatGPT. Due to the bot being demoed mostly through prerecorded video, when people got hands-on, they found it to be a lackluster experience.