The Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek has rattled markets with claims that its latest AI model, R1, performs on a par with those of OpenAI, despite using less advanced computer chips and consuming less energy. DeepSeek's emergence has raised concerns that China may have overtaken the U.S. in the artificial intelligence race despite restrictions on its access to the most advanced chips. Like the U.S., China is investing billions into artificial intelligence. Last week, it created a 60 billion yuan ( 8.2 billion) AI investment fund, days after the U.S. imposed fresh chip export restrictions. Beijing has also invested heavily in the semiconductor industry to build its capacity to make advanced computer chips, working to overcome limits on its access to those of industry leaders.

In contemporary society, the issue of psychological health has become increasingly prominent, characterized by the diversification, complexity, and universality of mental disorders. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), currently the most influential and clinically effective psychological treatment method with no side effects, has limited coverage and poor quality in most countries. In recent years, researches on the recognition and intervention of emotional disorders using large language models (LLMs) have been validated, providing new possibilities for psychological assistance therapy. However, are LLMs truly possible to conduct cognitive behavioral therapy? Many concerns have been raised by mental health experts regarding the use of LLMs for therapy. Seeking to answer this question, we collected real CBT corpus from online video websites, designed and conducted a targeted automatic evaluation framework involving the evaluation of emotion tendency of generated text, structured dialogue pattern and proactive inquiry ability. For emotion tendency, we calculate the emotion tendency score of the CBT dialogue text generated by each model. For structured dialogue pattern, we use a diverse range of automatic evaluation metrics to compare speaking style, the ability to maintain consistency of topic and the use of technology in CBT between different models . As for inquiring to guide the patient, we utilize PQA (Proactive Questioning Ability) metric. We also evaluated the CBT ability of the LLM after integrating a CBT knowledge base to explore the help of introducing additional knowledge to enhance the model's CBT counseling ability. Four LLM variants with excellent performance on natural language processing are evaluated, and the experimental result shows the great potential of LLMs in psychological counseling realm, especially after combining with other technological means.

Existing humor datasets and evaluations predominantly focus on English, lacking resources for culturally nuanced humor in non-English languages like Chinese. To address this gap, we construct Chumor, a dataset sourced from Ruo Zhi Ba (RZB), a Chinese Reddit-like platform dedicated to sharing intellectually challenging and culturally specific jokes. We annotate explanations for each joke and evaluate human explanations against two state-of-the-art LLMs, GPT-4o and ERNIE Bot, through A/B testing by native Chinese speakers. Our evaluation shows that Chumor is challenging even for SOTA LLMs, and the human explanations for Chumor jokes are significantly better than explanations generated by the LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT show excellent capabilities in various natural language processing tasks, especially for text generation. The effectiveness of LLMs in summarizing radiology report impressions remains unclear. In this study, we explore the capability of eight LLMs on the radiology report impression summarization. Three types of radiology reports, i.e., CT, PET-CT, and Ultrasound reports, are collected from Peking University Cancer Hospital and Institute. We use the report findings to construct the zero-shot, one-shot, and three-shot prompts with complete example reports to generate the impressions. Besides the automatic quantitative evaluation metrics, we define five human evaluation metrics, i.e., completeness, correctness, conciseness, verisimilitude, and replaceability, to evaluate the semantics of the generated impressions. Two thoracic surgeons (ZSY and LB) and one radiologist (LQ) compare the generated impressions with the reference impressions and score each impression under the five human evaluation metrics. Experimental results show that there is a gap between the generated impressions and reference impressions. Although the LLMs achieve comparable performance in completeness and correctness, the conciseness and verisimilitude scores are not very high. Using few-shot prompts can improve the LLMs' performance in conciseness and verisimilitude, but the clinicians still think the LLMs can not replace the radiologists in summarizing the radiology impressions.

China's Baidu has announced that "Ernie Bot", its rival to ChatGPT, has racked up more than 200 million users, roughly double as many as in December. Baidu CEO Robin Li also said Ernie Bot's application programming interface (API) is being used 200 million times every day, meaning the chatbot was requested by its user to conduct tasks that many times a day. The number of enterprise clients for the chatbot reached 85,000, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen on Tuesday. In February, he told analysts that Baidu was starting to generate revenue from Ernie and in the fourth quarter, the company had earned several hundred million yuan using AI to improve its advertising services and help other companies build their own models. Last March, Ernie Bot was the first locally developed ChatGPT-like chatbot to be announced in China but it only won approval for public release in August, becoming one of the first eight AI chatbots Beijing authorised.

As I reported last week, Baidu became the first Chinese tech company to roll out its large language model--called Ernie Bot--to the general public, following a regulatory approval from the Chinese government. Previously, access required an application or was limited to corporate clients. You can read more about the news here. I have to admit the Chinese public has reacted more passionately than I had expected. According to Baidu, the Ernie Bot mobile app reached 1 million users in the 19 hours following the announcement, and the model responded to more than 33.42 million user questions in 24 hours, averaging 23,000 questions per minute.

The news: Baidu, one of China's leading artificial-intelligence companies, has announced it's opening up access to its ChatGPT-like large language model, Ernie Bot, to the general public. The context: Launched in mid-March, Ernie Bot was the first Chinese ChatGPT rival. Since then, many Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba and ByteDance, have followed suit and released their own models. What's next: On August 30, Baidu posted on social media that it will also release a batch of new AI applications within the Ernie Bot as the company rolls out open registration today. But even with the new access, it's unclear how many people will use the products.

China's Baidu has rolled out its ChatGPT rival ERNIE Bot to the public, in a major leap for the country's tech sector as it aims to cash in on the artificial intelligence gold rush. The Chinese government introduced new regulations this month for AI developers, aiming to allow them to stay in the race with the likes of ChatGPT maker OpenAI and Microsoft while tightly controlling information online. ERNIE Bot is the first domestic AI app to be fully available to the public in China. It is not available outside the country. "We are thrilled to share that ERNIE Bot is now fully open to the general public starting August 31," Baidu said in a statement on Thursday.

Another ChatGPT rival is out in the wild. Baidu has made ERNIE Bot, its generative AI product and large language model, generally available to the public through various app stores and its website. Alongside ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration), the company plans to release a string of AI apps it says will allow folks "to fully experience the four core abilities of generative AI: understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory." Opening up ERNIE Bot (which is focused on the Chinese market) to the public will enable Baidu to obtain much more human feedback, according to CEO Robin Li. The company notes that this will help it iterate on ERNIE Bot more quickly and improve the user experience. Baidu announced the chatbot back in March, demonstrating capabilities such as summarizing a sci-fi novel and offering suggestions on how to continue the story in an expanded universe.

When Ernie Bot was released on March 16, the response was a mix of excitement and disappointment. Many people deemed its performance mediocre relative to the previously released ChatGPT. But most people simply weren't able to see it for themselves. The launch event didn't feature a live demonstration, and later, to actually try out the bot, Chinese users need to have a Baidu account and apply for a use license that could take as long as three months to come through. Because of this, some people who got access early were selling secondhand Baidu accounts on e-commerce sites, charging anywhere from a few bucks to over $100.