Baidu Unveils LLM ERNIE 4.0, Transforming Individuals into an AI Marketing Team

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The generative AI race is not letting up. This week, Chinese search and web portal giant Baidu announced the release of ERNIE 4.0, its new large language foundation model, and previewed a whole host of new software applications built atop it, including one — Qingduo, a creative platform that aims to rival Canva and Adobe Creative Cloud, both of which have recently also added new AI features.

Taking the stage at the company’s annual Baidu World 2023 conference in Beijing, Baidu CEO Robin Li said Qingduo allows “one person to become an AI marketing team.”

Li demonstrated the generative capabilities of ERNIE 4.0 on-site. Within a few minutes, ERNIE Bot rapidly generated a set of advertising posters, five advertising copy lines, and a marketing video. It was mentioned that based on this capability, Baidu has launched the AIGC… pic.twitter.com/YkgszBDDVJ

— Baidu Inc. (@Baidu_Inc) October 17, 2023

Li said ERNIE 4.0 and the user-facing text chatbot, ERNIE Bot — similar to how rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT is the chatbot built atop the company’s GPT foundation model — was built to perform four core capabilities: understanding, generating, reasoning, and memorizing.

In live demos, Li showcased ERNIE Bot’s prowess in understanding complicated and jumbled human requests and responding to them.