As I reported final week, Baidu turned the primary Chinese tech firm to roll out its giant language mannequin—known as Ernie Bot—to most people, following a regulatory approval from the Chinese authorities. Previously, entry required an utility or was restricted to company purchasers. You can learn extra concerning the information right here.
I’ve to admit the Chinese public has reacted extra passionately than I had anticipated. According to 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 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. But 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 completely different from its predecessors like ChatGPT.
What I seen first was that Ernie Bot does much more hand-holding. Unlike ChatGPT’s public app or web site, which is basically only a chat field, Baidu’s app has much more options which are designed to onboard and have interaction new customers.
Under Ernie Bot’s chat field, there’s an limitless listing of immediate options—like “Come up with a name for a baby” and “Generating a work report.” There’s one other tab known as “Discovery” that shows over 190 pre-selected matters, together with gamified challenges (“Convince the AI boss to raise my salary”) and customised chatting situations (“Compliment me”).
It appears to me {that a} main problem for Chinese AI firms is that now, with authorities approval to open up to the general public, they really want to earn customers and hold them . To many individuals, chatbots are a novelty proper now. But that novelty will ultimately put on off, and the apps want to be sure individuals produce other causes to keep.
One intelligent factor Baidu has accomplished is to embody a tab for user-generated content material within the app. In the neighborhood discussion board, I can see the questions different customers have requested the app, in addition to the textual content and picture responses they bought. Some of them are on level and enjoyable, whereas others are manner off base, however I can see how this evokes customers to strive to enter prompts themselves and work to enhance the solutions.