Chatbots have become increasingly popular, offering a new way to interact with technology. China’s ChatGPT, Ernie, is making headlines as a great ChatGPT alternative for users in China.
Baidu’s blog post highlights Ernie’s ability to generate different creative text formats. This means Ernie can craft various content, including poems, code, and even business documents. Interestingly, Ernie can also tackle mathematical formulas!
But how does Ernie stack up against ChatGPT and how can you try China’s ChatGPT? Let us explain!
What is Ernie?
Ernie, short for Enhanced Representation from Transformers with Incomplete Information, is a generative pre-trained transformer model. Simply put, it’s a computer program trained on a massive amount of Chinese text data. This allows Ernie to understand and respond to written prompts and questions in a natural, human-like way.
Similar to ChatGPT, Ernie can be used for a variety of tasks, including:
- Writing different kinds of creative text formats, like poems, code, scripts, musical pieces, emails, and letters.
- Answering your questions in an informative way, even open-ended, challenging, or strange ones.
- Translating languages.
- Generating different creative text formats, like business documents and mathematical formulas.
How to Use Ernie
Currently, Ernie isn’t available as a standalone app like ChatGPT. Instead, it’s integrated into various Baidu services, such as its search engine and its smart assistant, DuerOS. This means you can interact with Ernie through these platforms.
Here’s a glimpse into how you might use Ernie:
- Search with Ernie: Let’s say you typed a question into Baidu’s search bar. Instead of just providing links, Ernie could directly answer your question in a comprehensive way, using the information it finds on the web.
- Chat with Ernie through DuerOS: DuerOS is a voice assistant similar to Siri or Alexa. By enabling Ernie on DuerOS, you could have a conversation with Ernie through voice commands. You could ask it to write you a poem, translate a phrase, or answer a factual question.
Apart from that, Bernie is available on a web-based platform but it currently only operates in Chinese.
Ernie vs ChatGPT
Both Ernie and ChatGPT are large language models, but a key difference lies in their specialty. While ChatGPT is designed for the English language, Ernie focuses on Chinese. This allows Ernie to understand the nuances and complexities of written Chinese, making it potentially more effective for tasks involving that language.
According to Baidu, Ernie 3.5 even outperformed ChatGPT in some areas related to Chinese language capabilities. This was based on benchmark tests that measured performance on tasks like writing and comprehension.
However, it’s important to note that direct comparisons between Ernie and ChatGPT can be challenging. They are trained on different datasets and operate within different technological ecosystems. Therefore it wouldn’t be right to compare its uses for western users.
Featured image credit: Baidu
