As I reported final week, Baidu grew to become the primary Chinese language tech firm to roll out its giant language mannequin—known as Ernie Bot—to most people, following a regulatory approval from the Chinese language authorities. Beforehand, entry required an utility or was restricted to company shoppers. You possibly can learn extra in regards to the information right here.
I’ve to confess the Chinese language public has reacted extra passionately than I had anticipated. In line with Baidu, the Ernie Bot cell 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 language corporations—the facial-recognition big SenseTime and three younger startups, Zhipu AI, Baichuan AI, and MiniMax—have additionally made their LLM chatbot merchandise broadly out there. However 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 attempt it out. I used to be curious to learn how it’s totally different from its predecessors like ChatGPT.
What I observed first was that Ernie Bot does much more hand-holding. Not like 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 interact new customers.
Beneath Ernie Bot’s chat field, there’s an limitless listing of immediate ideas—like “Provide you with a reputation for a child” and “Producing a piece report.” There’s one other tab known as “Discovery” that shows over 190 pre-selected matters, together with gamified challenges (“Persuade the AI boss to boost my wage”) and customised chatting eventualities (“Praise me”).
It appears to me {that a} main problem for Chinese language AI corporations is that now, with authorities approval to divulge heart’s contents to the general public, they really must earn customers and maintain them . To many individuals, chatbots are a novelty proper now. However that novelty will ultimately put on off, and the apps want to ensure folks produce other causes to remain.
One intelligent factor Baidu has carried out is to incorporate 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 acquired. A few of them are on level and enjoyable, whereas others are means off base, however I can see how this evokes customers to attempt to enter prompts themselves and work to enhance the solutions.