Baidu's CEO says its ERNIE AI 'is not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4'

ERNIE, Baidu's answer to ChatGPT, has "achieved a full upgrade," company CEO Robin Li told the assembled crowd at the Baidu World 2023 showcase on Tuesday, "with drastically improved performance in understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory." During his keynote address, Li demonstrated improvements to those four core capabilities on-stage by having the AI create a multimodal car commercial in a few minutes based on a short text prompt, solve complex geometry problems and progressively iterate the plot for a short story on the spot. The fourth-gen generative AI system "is not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4," he continued. ERNIE 4.0 will offer an "improved" search experience resembling that of Google's SGE, aggregating and summarizing information pulled from the wider web and distilled into a generated response.The system will be multimodal, providing answers as text, images or animated graphs through an "interactive chat interface for more complex searches, enabling users to iteratively refine their queries until reaching the optimal answer, all in one search interface," per the company's press. What's more, the AI will be able to recommend "highly customized" content streams based on previous interactions with the user.