Ernie Bot ( zh, c=文心一言, Pinyin: ), full name Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, is an AI chatbot service product of Baidu, released in 2023. It is built on a

large language model A large language model (LLM) is a language model consisting of a neural network with many parameters (typically billions of weights or more), trained on large quantities of unlabelled text using self-supervised learning. LLMs emerged around 2018 an ...

called ERNIE, which has been in development since 2019. The latest version, ERNIE 4.0, was announced on October 17, 2023.

History

Ernie Bot was initially released for invited testing on March 16, 2023, based on "Ernie 3.0", a large language model that had been in development since 2019. Ernie's so-called live release demo was reported to have been prerecorded, which caused Baidu's stock to drop 10 percent the same day. The company's stock gained 14 percent on the next day after analysts from

Citigroup Citigroup Inc. or Citi (Style (visual arts), stylized as citi) is an American multinational investment banking, investment bank and financial services corporation headquartered in New York City. The company was formed by the merger of banking ...

and Bank of America tested Ernie Bot and gave it a preliminary thumbs-up. Ernie Bot was released to the public after receiving the green light from Chinese regulatory authorities on August 31, 2023. "Ernie 3.0", the language model, was trained with 10 billion parameters on a 4 terabyte (TB) corpus which consists of plain texts and a large-scale knowledge graph. It was then updated to "Ernie 3.5" in June 2023, but it was "slightly inferior" to Open AI's GPT-4. As a response, "Ernie 4.0" was unveiled in October and was released for paying subscribers in November of the same year. Baidu claimed that Ernie bot received more than 100 million users as of December 2023. Ernie Bot's accumulated user base grew to 200 million as April 2024. In January 2024, Hong Kong newspaper ''

South China Morning Post The ''South China Morning Post'' (''SCMP''), with its Sunday edition, the ''Sunday Morning Post'', is a Hong Kong-based English-language newspaper owned by Alibaba Group. Founded in 1903 by Tse Tsan-tai and Alfred Cunningham, it has remained ...

'' reported that a university research lab linked to the

People's Liberation Army The People's Liberation Army (PLA) is the principal military force of the People's Republic of China and the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The PLA consists of five service branches: the Ground Force, Navy, Air Force, ...

(PLA) had tested Ernie Bot and iFlyTek's Spark for military response plans with scenarios involving the United States. After its listed stock in Hong Kong plunged by more than 11.5 percent, Baidu made an official statement denying the allegations. Ernie was integrated for the Chinese launch of Samsung's Galaxy S24 lineup. In June 2024, Baidu announced that Ernie Bot had reached 300 million users. The company also unveiled its latest foundation model, Ernie 4.0 Turbo, which boasts faster response times and improved performance. In September 2024, Baidu gave everyone using the app access to the 4.0 Turbo model and also announced it would change its Chinese name from "Wenxin Yiyan" () to "Wenxiaoyan" () positioning itself as a search assistant.

Training

Ernie Bot is based on particular Ernie foundation models, including Ernie 3.0, Ernie 3.5, and Ernie 4.0. The training process starts from pre-training, learning from trillions of data points and billions of knowledge pieces. This was followed by refinement through supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning with human feedback, and

prompt Prompt may refer to: Computing * Command prompt, characters indicating the computer is ready to accept input * Command Prompt, also known as cmd.exe or cmd, the command-line interpreter in some operating systems * Prompt (natural language), instr ...

Service

In its subscription options, the professional plan gives users access to Ernie 4.0 with a payment either for a month or with reduced payment for auto-renewal per month. Meanwhile, Ernie 3.5 is free of charge. Ernie 4.0, the language model for Ernie bot, has information updated to April 2023.

Censorship

Ernie Bot is subject to the Chinese government's censorship regime. In public tests with journalists, Ernie Bot refused to answer questions about Xi Jinping, the

1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre The Tiananmen Square protests, known in Chinese as the June Fourth Incident (), were student-led demonstrations held in Tiananmen Square, Beijing during 1989. In what is known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre, or in Chinese the June Fourth ...

, the

persecution of Uyghurs in China The Chinese government is committing a series of ongoing human rights abuses against Uyghurs and other ethnic and religious minorities in Xinjiang that is often characterized as persecution or as genocide. Beginning in 2014, the Chine ...

in Xinjiang, and the

2019–2020 Hong Kong protests The Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement, also known as the 2019 Hong Kong protests, or the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests, were a series of demonstrations from 15 March 2019 in response to the introduction by the Hong Kong government ...

. When queried about the

origin of COVID-19 Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been efforts by scientists, governments, and others to determine the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Most scientists agree that, as with many other pandemics in human history, the virus i ...

, Ernie Bot stated that it originated among American vape users.

References

External links