Robin Li Yanhong showcased Ernie Bot 4 at the Baidu World 2023 conference in Beijing. The company’s billionaire CEO gave a demo on how Ernie Bot is now better at handling difficult questions and generating pictures. According to a report by South Morning China Post, Li said, “Ernie Bot has completed a series of significant updates in its abilities of understanding, prompting, reasoning and memorising,” Li said. “Its generalised abilities are by no means inferior compared to GPT-4,” the report quoted him as saying.
Back in March this year, Baidu first announced Ernie Bot and opened it up to users in China in August. According to the company, Ernie Bot has a user base of close to 45 million and 54,000 developers.
China’s tough AI rules are coming
Recent reports have revealed that China has published new draft guidance and is looking at improving two aspects of use of AI in the country. First, how the training data is used and whether its secure and the security of large language models (LLMs), which are used for generative AI tech like ChatGPT or Baidu’s Ernie Bot.
The authorities in China wants to ensure that any data which is used to train AI models shouldn’t have any copyright infringement. Also, it shouldn’t breach any personal data. According to online reports, all the training data should be “processed by authorised data labellers and reviewers to pass security checks first.” In other words, the data should go through human eyes first before it is generated artificially. Baidu’s Ernie Bot too had to go through strict government approvals before it was made open to the public in China.