It was to be expected, not only because the announcement of a Chinese-style generative AI had already been made last March.
But at least for two other reasons. The first: a tech war has been going on for some time between Western countries and Beijing, which has seen TikTok as its most illustrious victim, first banned from the devices of various national and supranational institutions, then even by an entire US state, Montana.
Second reason, connected to the first: if the Western boycott of Chinese technology has aroused a feeling of revenge in the Beijing government, what better terrain to compete than generative artificial intelligence, which has been filling the news for months now?
This is how Baidu, the main Chinese search engine (used by 80% of users), concluded the test phase. And he has now launched Ernie Bot, the first Chinese artificial intelligence (and, as we will see, reserved for Chinese users).
But what do we know, so far, about the Ernie Bot?
Off to Ernie Bot, the Chinese ChatGPT
It was Baidu himself, in a note, who announced the end of the test phase: Ernie Bot was launched on Thursday 31 August. “We are thrilled to be able to share that Ernie Bot is now fully ready for the public as of August 31st.”
The AI for the moment will only be available within the Chinese territory (where instead, let’s remember, ChatGPT, Bing and Bard are banned).
Robin Li, co-founder and president of Baidu, said Ernie Bot will bring “massive feedback to improve the app at a rapid pace.”
More than 650 Chinese companies had already pre-ordered the software after the preview presentation last March.
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A difficult balance between technology and ideology
The global success of ChatGPT has inevitably sparked a race to develop rival applications, and now it’s China’s turn with Ernie Bot.
Ma Beijing has to navigate a very difficult balance, that of the need to keep up from a tech point of view, on the other hand without compromising the recent guidelines issued in April, which only came into force on August 15.
Guidelines that AI products developed in China must “be in line with the core values of socialism.” In addition to not being a threat to national security, it does not promote terrorism, violence, ethnic hatred and fake news.
Violators will be fined and, in more serious cases, subjected to criminal investigations.
TikTok (or rather ByteDance, the owner company) was found to be eligible for the new guidelines. And Robin Li, commenting on them, defined them as “more focused on innovation than on control”.
Not just Ernie Bots
“In addition to the Ernie Bot, Baidu will launch a suite of new native AI apps that will enable users to fully experience the four core capabilities of generative AI: understanding, generating, reasoning,” Baidu said in a statement. and memory”.
But there’s more. In China, not only Baidu has been working on an artificial intelligence. SenseTime, Baichuan Intelligent Technology, and Zhipu AI have also unveiled their AI-powered chatbots to the public after getting the green light from Beijing.
And it looks like the next company to bring its own artificial intelligence product to market will be SenseTime. A spokesperson for which told Reuters that the SenseChat chatbot is “fully available to serve all users”.
The boom after the initial doubts
Ever since Ernie Bot was downloadable, it has rocketed to the top of the Apple Store charts.
However, it is not easy to know what technology it is based on, nor how it is trained, in order to maintain the aforementioned and not easy balance between innovation and regime censorship.
Of course, when Ernie Bot premiered last March, public and investors had been rather lukewarm. Perhaps it didn’t reward the way the product was showcased to the public: not through a live demo but with a series of pre-recorded videos. Five, to be precise: in one, the chatbot wrote a sequel to a novel, then came up with a company name, solved a math problem, wrote a poem and generated an image from a string of text.