Baidu CEO Announces Over 70 AI Models in China

According to a report by Reuters, Baidu CEO Robin Li stated on September 5 that more than 70 artificial intelligence (AI) models have been released in China.

Li commented that the over 70 AI language models that have been released were developed with over 1 billion parameters, which technically qualifies them as large language models (LLMs).

Currently, some of the largest LLMs on the market include Meta’s Llama, which was released earlier this year with 65 billion parameters, and OpenAI’s Chat GPT-4, whose parameters have not been made public but are rumored to exceed 170 trillion.

When it comes to LLMs, parameters are significant because a greater number of parameters allows the model to capture more data details.

Ultimately, this improves the model’s performance. Baidu, a prominent Chinese developer of artificial intelligence and provider of internet services, published the most recent version of its Ernie chatbot on August 30.

It was among the first companies to deploy chatbots for public use following China’s new AI regulations. According to Li, the most recent iteration of Baidu’s chatbot, Ernie 3.5, has twice the processing speed of its predecessor and is 50% more efficient.

Additionally, he disclosed that the company intends to release a newer version in the “near future. Earlier this summer, on Aug. 3, the Chinese e-commerce and tech behemoth Alibaba launched two new AI models that are open-sourced and said to rival Meta’s Llama 2.

The Chinese government enacted and implemented its AI laws only recently. Previously, companies were permitted to conduct small-scale evaluations of their AI products; however, the new rules have increased the test size and enabled additional features.