Baidu unveils ERNIE 4.0

Robin Li announced ERNIE 4.0 at Baidu World 2023 in Beijing, describing it as Baidu’s most capable foundation model to date and the successor to the ERNIE 3.5 system that had powered ERNIE Bot since its March release. Baidu said the new model brought substantial gains in understanding, generation, reasoning and memory, and Li claimed on stage that its capabilities were “not inferior in any aspect” to OpenAI’s GPT-4 — a comparison the company did not accompany with published benchmark tables, and which outside evaluators could not immediately verify.

The event was Baidu’s first in-person Baidu World since 2019, and the company framed ERNIE 4.0 less as a standalone chatbot than as the engine for a set of “AI-native” applications it demonstrated the same day, spanning search, maps, and office software. Access at launch was limited: individual users could try the model on ERNIE Bot by invitation, while enterprise customers were directed to apply for API testing through Baidu’s Qianfan foundation-model platform. Baidu had received regulatory approval to open ERNIE Bot to the public weeks earlier, in August, under China’s generative-AI rules.

The unveiling was widely read as Baidu’s attempt to show that a Chinese company could field a model in the same tier as the leading US systems within months of them, rather than years. Independent confirmation of the parity claim was harder to come by — the model was not openly accessible for third-party testing at release, and much of the evidence offered was Baidu’s own — but ERNIE 4.0 became the basis for the company’s paid “ERNIE Bot Pro” tier and its subsequent enterprise AI offerings.