On Tuesday (June 27), Baidu Research announced that the latest iteration of its foundational model, ERNIE, has been upgraded to version 3.5. This new version has apparently shown significant progress in beta testing, reportedly surpassing ChatGPT (3.5) in comprehensive ability scores and outperforming GPT-4 in several Chinese language capabilities.
Baidu, Inc. is a prominent Chinese multinational technology company founded in 2000. Known as the “Google of China,” Baidu operates one of the world’s largest search engines. The company has diversified into various tech sectors, including artificial intelligence, autonomous driving, and cloud computing, establishing itself as a significant player in the global tech industry.
According to Baidu, the new ERNIE 3.5 has demonstrated improvements in creative writing, Q&A, reasoning, and code generation, as well as in training performance and inference performance. It has managed to double the training throughput and increase the inference throughput by an impressive 17-fold compared to ERNIE 3.0.
Baidu says one of the standout features of ERNIE 3.5 is the introduction of plugins. The default built-in plugin, “Baidu Search”, equips ERNIE Bot with the ability to generate real-time and precise information. Another plugin, ChatFile, enables long text summaries and Q&A.
Per Baidu Research’s blog post, ERNIE 3.5 incorporates cutting-edge strategies from PaddlePaddle, including adaptive hybrid parallel training technology and mixed-precision computing. These enhancements, combined with optimized data sources and data distribution, have accelerated the model’s iteration speed, bolstered its efficacy, and ensured its safety.
Baidu also mentioned that ERNIE 3.5 has also implemented a technique called “Knowledge Snippet Enhancement.” This technique significantly enhances the model’s understanding and utilization of world knowledge, leading to remarkable task improvements.
ERNIE Bot, currently in public beta testing, has been upgraded to version 2.0 since May 23. The most recent update, ERNIE Bot v2.1.0, released on June 21, added the new ChatFile plugin and improved capabilities in mathematical computations and creative writing, all powered by ERNIE 3.5.
Dr. Haifeng Wang, CTO of Baidu, stated that test users could access the service at any time to experience the performance of ERNIE 3.5. He added that any applications involving language, text, or code could potentially utilize ERNIE Bot, which is already being used in various fields such as smart offices, coding, marketing, media, education, and finance.
