Zeyi Yang, MIT Technology Review:
On March 16, Robin Li, Baidu’s cofounder and CEO, took the stage in Beijing to showcase the company’s new large language model, Ernie Bot.
Accompanied by art created by Baidu’s image-making AI, he showed examples of what the chatbot can do, including solve math questions, write marketing copy, answer questions about Chinese literature, and generate multimedia responses.
[…]
The highlight of the product release was Ernie Bot’s multimodal output feature, which ChatGPT and GPT-4 do not offer… Li showed a recorded interaction with the bot where it generated an illustration of a futuristic city transportation system, used Chinese dialect to read out a text answer, and edited and subtitled a video based on the same text. However, in later testing after the launch, a Chinese publication failed to reproduce the video generation.
If Baidu’s presentation is accurate, Ernie’s multimodal features are genuinely impressive. While the image generation abilities do not seem any more advanced than DALL-E, the audio and video generation features are honestly striking.
Meanwhile… Che Pan at SCMP:
Fang Bingxing, considered the father of China’s Great Firewall… said the rise of generative AI tools like ChatGPT… pose a big challenge to governments around the world, according to an interview published on Thursday… “People’s perspectives can be manipulated as they seek all kinds of answers from AI,” he was quoted as saying.
[…]
Many expected that China’s heavily-censored internet would be a challenge for Chinese tech companies in developing a ChatGPT-like service because it is hard to predict and control answers.
China’s powerful internet regulators have told Chinese tech companies not to offer ChatGPT access to the public, and they need to inform the authorities before launching their own ChatGPT-like services, according to a report by Nikkei Asia in February