As I reported final week, Baidu grew to become the primary Chinese language tech firm to roll out its massive language mannequin—referred to as Ernie Bot—to most of the people, following a regulatory approval from the Chinese language authorities. Beforehand, entry required an utility or was restricted to company purchasers. You possibly can learn extra in regards to the information here.
I’ve to confess the Chinese language public has reacted extra passionately than I had anticipated. In response to 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 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. 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 strive it out. I used to be curious to learn how it’s totally different from its predecessors like ChatGPT.
What I seen 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 can be designed to onboard and interact new customers.
Underneath Ernie Bot’s chat field, there’s an limitless record of immediate strategies—like “Provide you with a reputation for a child” and “Producing a piece report.” There’s one other tab referred to as “Discovery” that shows over 190 pre-selected subjects, together with gamified challenges (“Persuade the AI boss to lift my wage”) and customised chatting situations (“Praise me”).
It appears to me {that a} main problem for Chinese language AI firms is that now, with authorities approval to speak in confidence to the general public, they really have to 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 performed is to incorporate a tab for user-generated content material within the app. Locally 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 method off base, however I can see how this evokes customers to attempt to enter prompts themselves and work to enhance the solutions.
