China's Baidu dethrones Google to take AI language crown

Chinese technology giant Baidu has overtaken Google and Microsoft in an artificial intelligence competition designed to test how well a machine can understand human language. Baidu, which is often referred to as China's Google, achieved the highest ever score in the General Language Understanding Evaluation (Glue) – widely considered to be the benchmark for AI language understanding. The firm's Ernie (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration) model became the first to score above 90 on the test, topping a leaderboard dominated by US tech firms and universities. The feat also makes it one of only 10 AI systems to surpass the average human score of 87.1 on the GLUE benchmark. Ernie used a similar method to Google's Bert (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model, which transformed natural-language understanding for AI when it was created last year.