Ernie Bot

Ernie Bot, 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 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 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 of 4 terrabyte (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 reported that a university research lab linked to the People's Liberation Army (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.

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.

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 persecution of Uyghurs in China in Xinjiang, and the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests. When queried about the origin of COVID-19, Ernie Bot stated that it originated among American vape users.