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Cashing in on the current AI wave, China-based tech firm Baidu is developing an AI-powered chatbot similar to OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT, Bloomberg reported. What’s more? Baidu plans to embed the chatbot into its search engine as early as March, much before ChatGPT is embedded into Microsoft Bing.
While ChatGPT has been trained on OpenAI’s GPT3.5 architecture, Baidu’s chatbot has been trained on ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration) 3.0 Titan, a language model developed by the Chinese tech giant.
GPT-3.5, which is a fine-tuned version of GPT-3, has 175 billion parameters, ERNIE 3.0 has 260 billion parameters. Interestingly, the initial version of ERNIE, which was launched in 2019, outperformed Google’s BERT, a pre-trained language representation model.
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Undoubtedly, ChatGPT has been a game-changer and has elevated the generative AI industry to new heights, but the media attention it receives is not unprecedented. The Wall Street Journal called Baidu’s chatbot ‘China’s entry into the global AI race’. However, for Baidu, there are a few stumbling blocks for it to fulfil its global AI ambitions.
The Great Firewall of China Barrier
In China, the government controls the internet. The Xi Jinping-led administration claims the authority to censor internet content within its jurisdiction. China is, in fact, one of the strictest censorship regimes in the world. From political dissent and discussion of sensitive historical events in China to information about its leaders and high-level officials, the government censors almost everything through the Great Firewall of China programme.
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Through the programme, the Chinese government blocks access to websites and online content that the government deems harmful, sensitive, or in violation of its regulations. So, the question is whether Baidu’s chatbot will also face the Chinese government’s censorship. Unfortunately, the answer to this mostly is yes.
ERNIE-VilG, Baidu’s text-to-image AI generator, a competitor to DALL-E2 and Stable Diffusion, already rejects politically sensitive prompts. Chances are high that Baidu’s chatbot’s responses will toe the government’s line and this could prove to be a stumbling block for Baidu’s global ambitions.
Additionally, OpenAI is continually refining ChatGPT through human feedback. It is utilised globally, whereas Baidu’s chatbot, if only employed within China, could result in a noticeably different training process or even biases for the outside world.
Catering to China Only
Baidu is the most-used search engine with a market share of 72.37%, as of May 2021. However, the Chinese search engine had a global market share of just 1.64% during that period, according to Statista.
When it comes to the architecture, ERNIE 3.0 Titan has been pre-trained on heterogeneous Chinese data. However, since the chatbot will be available in both Chinese and English, it means the chatbot has been trained on English datasets as well. But for now, it’s difficult to assume how accurate Baidu’s chatbot will be, compared to ChatGPT. (Let’s not forget ChatGPT is also not highly accurate).
Since Baidu’s chatbot and ChatGPT are trained on a completely different dataset, their responses too will vary. While it might cater to the Chinese audience, how successfully will it cater to the global audience remains to be seen.
