As I reported final week, Baidu turned the primary Chinese language tech firm to roll out its giant language mannequin—known as Ernie Bot—to most people, following a regulatory approval from the Chinese language authorities. Beforehand, entry required an utility or was restricted to company purchasers. You’ll be able to learn extra concerning the information right here.
I’ve to confess the Chinese language public has reacted extra passionately than I had anticipated. In accordance with Baidu, the Ernie Bot cellular app reached 1 million customers within the 19 hours following the announcement, and the mannequin responded to greater than 33.42 million consumer questions in 24 hours, averaging 23,000 questions per minute.
Since then, 4 extra Chinese language firms—the facial-recognition big SenseTime and three younger startups, Zhipu AI, Baichuan AI, and MiniMax—have additionally made their LLM chatbot merchandise broadly obtainable. However some extra skilled gamers, like Alibaba and iFlytek, are nonetheless ready for the clearance.
Like many others, I downloaded the Ernie Bot app final week to strive it out. I used to be curious to learn how it’s totally different from its predecessors like ChatGPT.
What I seen first was that Ernie Bot does much more hand-holding. In contrast to ChatGPT’s public app or web site, which is actually only a chat field, Baidu’s app has much more options which are designed to onboard and interact new customers.
Beneath Ernie Bot’s chat field, there’s an countless listing of immediate recommendations—like “Give you a reputation for a child” and “Producing a piece report.” There’s one other tab known as “Discovery” that shows over 190 pre-selected subjects, together with gamified challenges (“Persuade the AI boss to lift my wage”) and customised chatting situations (“Praise me”).
It appears to me {that a} main problem for Chinese language AI firms is that now, with authorities approval to divulge heart’s contents to the general public, they really must earn customers and hold them . To many individuals, chatbots are a novelty proper now. However that novelty will finally put on off, and the apps want to verify individuals produce other causes to remain.
One intelligent factor Baidu has completed is to incorporate a tab for user-generated content material within the app. Locally discussion board, I can see the questions different customers have requested the app, in addition to the textual content and picture responses they bought. A few of them are on level and enjoyable, whereas others are approach off base, however I can see how this conjures up customers to attempt to enter prompts themselves and work to enhance the solutions.