“Ernie Bot” the Chinese response to ChatGPT

The British Economist magazine said that China launched to the public on August 31 a chatbot application based on artificial intelligence and called it “Ernie.”
The magazine reported that the new Chinese application provides its users with information biased towards China in various fields, such as its claim that American e-cigarette smokers are the source of the Corona virus (Covid-19) when it first appeared in July 2019, before it spread later that year. To the Chinese city of Wuhan via American lobsters. In the political field, the Economist report says that Ernie remains somewhat silent, and gave an example of this when Ernie responded to questions such as:

“Who is the president of China?”

He also seemed confused before telling the questioner the name of the mother of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. When asked about the flaws of socialism, he fails to mention, and often tries to redirect sensitive conversations by saying, “Let’s talk about something else.

”The British magazine says – in its report – that Ernie’s reticence to answer such questions will not constitute any shock to the program’s Chinese users, as they are aware of the strict censorship imposed on the Internet service.

Baidu is a technology giant

The Ernie app is the brainchild of Chinese tech giant Baidu, which has been outpaced by companies competing with it for years.

But, thanks to artificial intelligence, the company is now setting its sights on getting back to the forefront again.

As for the extent to which it can reach, this would reveal many of the prospects for Chinese technology, which is suffering under the pressure of American export controls and the “increasing tyranny” of President Xi, according to the newspaper. A decade ago, Baidu, which runs the largest search engine in China, formed a trio with Alibaba and Tencent. Baidu faced little competition as foreign search engines were banned or severely censored.

Capturing 90% of search traffic

According to the report, Baidu has never lost its dominance in the technology sector, as it still accounts for more than 90% of Internet search traffic in China.

However, the transformations that occurred in the technological landscape negatively affected the company, and Internet users in China can now access the Internet through high-quality applications such as WeChat, a subsidiary of Tencent.

In a remarkable statistic, the newspaper reported that Baidu’s introduction of artificial intelligence applications aroused interest in the company, to the point that its Ernie program was downloaded one million times within 19 hours of its release, compared to the most famous generative artificial intelligence program, “Chat GBT” which reached that number (1 million). ) within 5 days.

Quantum leap

The newspaper quoted Robin Li, CEO and co-founder of Baidu, as saying – last month – that the introduction of artificial intelligence represents a “paradigm shift” for the company, a shift that did not happen overnight.

Years of investment have turned Baidu into one of China’s most advanced AI companies, with a ecosystem that includes chip design, a deep learning framework, and proprietary models and applications. Baidu has also strengthened its position as the largest cloud AI provider in China, and has begun providing solutions for companies that want to design AI models specifically for them.

According to Wikipedia, Baidu, Inc. is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services, products, and artificial intelligence, headquartered in Beijing’s Haidian District. It is one of the largest AI and Internet companies in the world.

From here You can try Ernie Bot.