Also the China enter the game onartificial intelligence. Baidu, the Chinese Google, has launched Ernie Bot to the public, the first home AI app fully available only in China to rival ChatGpt of OpenAi (banned in Beijing), but continuing to maintain a tight grip on online information. “We are thrilled to report that Ernie Bot is now fully open to the public as of August 31st,” reads a statement from China's leading online search engine. Until now, however, only Chinese users selected after a long waiting list could access it.
Ernie Bot was introduced in March in limited form: the first generative AI tool to overcome the hurdle of new regulation provisional for the control of generative AI services, which entered into force on August 15th.
Beijing eases the brakes on artificial intelligence
Le rulesin fact, they will not be applied to companies developing AI technologies until their products are disseminated to the mass public. However, this is a less restrictive approach on the part of the authorities, who have no intention of limiting research to a field in which competition, especially from the United States, is extremely fierce. The latest version of the standards also did not include a licensing requirement for the Cyberspace Administration of China to be able to develop such models.
The knots
But there are gods nonetheless limits. The Ernie system would be trained to censor topics highly sensitive to the Communist Party of China, such as the crackdown on Tiananmen. But the public response was positive. Ernie's app has in fact shot to the top of the rankings of digital stores. And Baidu doesn't want to stop there, indeed it has announced that it will launch in the future other applications based precisely on AI and its four main capabilities, namely understanding, production, reasoning and memory.
The US-China challenge on artificial intelligence: who wins?
Ernie, like ChatGpt, can converse, answer questions and solve math problems. But given that artificial intelligences need huge amounts of data to learn, it is clear that this AI version of the Dragon cannot play on equal terms with the American ones. The responses of the Chinese AIs will probably also be programmed not to provide some information in the country.
Also, although Baidu is the most used search engine in China (chosen by 80% of surfers), its version of AI - according to company communications - was trained on about 260 billion parameters. While Gpt-4, the latest version of ChatGpt, has been trained on a trillion parameters. The higher the value of the parameters used, the higher – in theory – the ability of an AI to imitate human vocabulary and creativity will be.
Artificial intelligence in China: not just Ernie Bot
Also Baichuan Intelligent Technology e Zhipu AI presented their AI-powered chatbots to the public. There are also competing Tencent, Alibaba e ByteDance (the company that owns TikTok). But before they can be opened to the public, they must get the go-ahead from the Beijing government. SenseTime shouldn't be long in coming: a company spokesperson told Reuters that its chatbot, SenseChat, is also now "fully available to serve all users."
