From composing song lyrics about pandas to generating the “world’s cutest cat”, China’s answer to ChatGPT has just been launched.
Ernie Bot, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, is now fully accessible to the public, following Chinese government approval late last week.
Unlike other countries, China requires companies to submit security assessments and receive clearance before releasing mass-market AI products.
Authorities have recently accelerated efforts to support companies developing AI as the technology increasingly becomes a focus of competition with the United States.
Professor Haiqing Yu, an expert in China’s digital media at RMIT University, said it’s part of an AI “great leap forward”.
But how powerful will Ernie be in a realm of heavily-censored internet use, and how does this fit into China’s vision of becoming the world leader in AI?
Ernie, an acronym for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, is an AI chat product from Chinese tech giant Baidu, China’s leading online search provider.
But it’s not the only one — four AI start-up companies announced similar public launches last week, while TikTok owner ByteDance and Tencent, which owns WeChat, have also received approvals from the government for AI development, Chinese media reported.
Fan Yang, a researcher at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society, said China has been putting more effort and resources into home-grown AI, which has led to big e-commerce platforms like Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, developing their own models.
“That makes this wave of AI development different to the past waves … which were powered by American companies, including Google and Microsoft,” she said.
The pitch from Baidu and others is that as Ernie is for Chinese people within Chinese culture, it will provide more accurate or insightful responses, but Dr Yang said there is still some distance between the capabilities of ChatGPT and Ernie.
“But also, the thing about AI technology is that the more people who use it, the more feedback they receive, [and] the better they can get.”
Professor Yu said now that Chinese chatbots are open to public input, they will be “continuously optimising”, and she added China’s huge population meant there was an enormous pool of data that could be accessed.
But another issue for Ernie, the experts highlight, is China’s great firewall.
