Chinese tech company Baidu plans to launch the fifth version of its big language model with artificial intelligence (AI) elements in the second half of this year. This was reported by Reuters and CNBC, citing an informed source. The model, called Ernie 5, will have so-called multimodal capabilities, which means that in addition to text, it can also work with information from images, videos or sounds, or convert between them.
Failure to achieve widespread adoption
Baidu has positioned itself as one of China’s top players in the AI sector after making OpenAI’s ChatGPT models available to the general public in 2022, yet it has failed to achieve widespread adoption of its Ernie model, Reuters noted. Meanwhile, Baidu claims that the latest version of Ernie 4 released in August 2023 so far will match the GPT-4 model in terms of capabilities.
According to the company’s CEO Robin Li, the process cost of invoking a language model to generate output (so-called inference cost) can be reduced by more than 90 percent in 12 months. He said this at a technology summit in Dubai this week, according to the Emirates News Agency. “If you can reduce costs by a certain percentage, then that means your productivity will increase by that percentage. I think that’s basically the essence of innovation,” he said.
Innovation and the fight against the West
In January, Baidu announced that its Wenku platform for creating presentations and other documents had 40 million paying users by the end of 2024, according to CNBC. That’s 60 percent more than at the end of 2023. Just since January, the company has been making new features available to users of the platform, such as automatically creating presentations from the company’s financial documents through AI.
The launch of an AI-enabled language model from Chinese startup DeepSeek recently generated a lot of buzz. According to media reports, the free-to-use chatbot R1 was developed at a much lower cost than competing US systems and is significantly less energy-intensive to operate. This raises questions about the future of US dominance in AI, as well as the large-scale investments US businesses are planning in relation to AI, CNBC wrote at the time.
Source: Czech Press Office
