Baidu co-founder Robin Li has used the example of a Tang dynasty poetry meter to demonstrate what he says is ERNIE 4.0’s superiority to OpenAI’s GPT-4 on Chinese language tasks. In an interview broadcast by Chinese state television last week, the Baidu chief executive said the company’s latest AI chatbot had shown higher aptitude when tasked with creating poetry in the form of a complex Tang dynasty scheme known as Qinyuanchun.

“If I asked GPT to compose a poem following the Qinyuanchun scheme, the tool would become totally confused,” Li said, “because it lacks the understanding of whether the first sentence should consist of four words or five.”

Why it matters: Li’s attempt to emphasize ERNIE’s competitive advantage in certain areas follows a raft of Chinese AI ventures receiving outside capital injections from Baidu’s rivals. His comments also come as OpenAI’s text-to-video model Sora kicks off a new round of AI mania worldwide.

Details: In the same interview, the CEO did acknowledge that ERNIE lags “a little bit behind” GPT in understanding English, as it hasn’t been trained on as much English language data.

• However, comparison is inevitable, and Chinese companies focusing on AI products have always benchmarked their products against OpenAI’s models. Such comparisons have often drawn scorn on Chinese social media, with Baidu itself often suffering in comparison to ChatGPT’s innovative progress. But Li told the CCTV show that he is “not angry” about the stark differences between ChatGPT and his firm’s self-built chatbot, adding that he hopes to change people’s perceptions within a year.
• Li also stated that, in his opinion, the profession of “programmer” will essentially cease to exist in the future as “everyone will possess programming abilities as long as one can speak.” English and Chinese will be the only two programming languages, Li predicted.
• Li also advised companies and entrepreneurs in the market to avoid engaging in the constant launch of large language models, which he regards as “repetitive labor.” He emphasized that “only applications truly create direct value.”

Context: Baidu’s investment in AI has yielded results in its financial reports, with its AI models and ERNIE chatbot contributing RMB 656 million ($91.5 million) to the firm’s revenue in the fourth quarter last year. However,  such contributions amounted to just 1.9% of the company’s total earnings.

• Li was speaking ahead of the one year anniversary of Baidu’s ERNIEbot, which launched on March 16 2023.

Related