Chinese company Baidu says its AI product outperforms ChatGPT in tests

HONG KONG, June 27 (Reuters) – Baidu Inc (9888.HK), a leading search service provider in China, said the latest version of its ChatGPT-style service outperformed Microsoft-powered OpenAI chatbot in several key metrics.

Baidu said in a statement on Tuesday that Ernie 3.5, the latest version of its AI model Ernie, has surpassed “ChatGPT in comprehensive skill scores” and surpassed “GPT-4 in various Chinese capabilities.”

The Beijing-based company cited a test by state-owned China Science Daily, which used data sets including AGIEval and C-Eval, two benchmarks used to evaluate the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) models.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment outside of normal business hours.

Baidu’s announcement comes amid a global AI craze that was started by ChatGPT and spread to China, prompting many local companies to announce competing products.

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Baidu was the first major Chinese technology company to launch an AI product to compete with ChatGPT, when it introduced its Ernie Bot chatbot in March. Ernie Bot, built on Baidu’s old Ernie 3.0 AI model, has undergone rigorous testing over the past three months.

Other major Chinese technology companies, including Alibaba Group (9988.HK) and Tencent Holdings (0700.HK), have also unveiled their AI models since then.

Baidu said its new model has better training and inference efficiency, which puts it in an advantageous position to make future iterations faster and cheaper. Baidu also mentioned that its new model will support external “plugins”.

Extensions are additional applications that will allow Baidu’s AI to work on more specific scenarios, such as summarizing long texts and generating more accurate responses.

ChatGPT released plugin support in March.