Chinese search engine Baidu has introduced a new chatbot called Ernie, based on a language model of the same name. Ernie is being touted as a competitor to Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing, both of which utilises their own language models. Ernie has already been shown to answer questions, generate mathematical formulas and create videos and images, but Baidu CEO Robin Li is quite candid in admitting that it isn’t perfect yet. Microsoft’s AI applications have proved successful of late, but Baidu’s share prices have suffered in the meantime.
Companies who use the Baidu cloud have the option to integrate Ernie into their own services, although there have been reports of Baidu’s recent announcement being lost in translation. By comparison, Google and Microsoft are further along in the process of introducing artificial intelligence to their work environments. Google Workspace is to get AI help for Docs, Slides, and Gmail, while Microsoft’s Copilot is designed to undertake automatic tasks.
