China's Baidu claims its AI model Ernie beats ChatGPT in multiple metrics

Baidu, the leading search engine provider in China, was the country's first tech company to debut a rival product to Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT

Founded in 2000, Baidu Inc, China's most popular search engine provider has stated that its artificial intelligence (AI) model, Ernie has surpassed ChatGPT on multiple key metrics.

In a statement issued on Tuesday, Baidu's said that its latest version of the AI model, Ernie 3.5 outperformed "GPT-4 in several Chinese capabilities," namely in its comprehensive ability.

This declaration follows a test run by a state newspaper called China Science Daily, which found that Ernie 3.5 came with better training and inference efficiency, which would not only make any further iterations of the technology faster but also more cost-efficient than Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT.

China Science Daily reportedly used datasets AGIEval and C-Eval, which are two benchmarks used to ascertain the performance of artificial intelligence models.

The Chinese-made AI also comes with plugin that was rolled out in March that allow it to adapt to more specific work scenarios such as summarising texts and generating more precise responses to questions.

The latest version on which Baidu's has based its claims has not yet been rolled out to the public. Instead, it has been going through invite-only tests for the past three months, added a report by Reuters.

This announcement is coming during a time when companies are rushing to create competing products to OpenAI's popular AI model, ChatGPT, which has also begun rolling the technology as an app. ChatGPT also introduced plugins in March to better adapt to specific work scenarios, building on the competition between natural language processing AI models.