ERNIE Bot can generate text, images, and videos based on natural language inputs. It is powered by ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration), a powerful deep learning model.

The first version of ERNIE was introduced and open-sourced in 2019 by researchers at Tsinghua University to demonstrate the natural language understanding capabilities of a model that combines both text and knowledge graph data.

Later that year, Baidu released ERNIE 2.0 which became the first model model to set a score higher than 90 on the GLUE benchmark for evaluating natural language understanding systems.

In 2021, Baidu’s researchers posted a paper on ERNIE 3.0 in which they claim the model exceeds human performance on the SuperGLUE natural language benchmark. ERNIE 3.0 set a new top score on SuperGLUE and displaced efforts from Google and Microsoft.

According to Baidu’s CEO Robin Li, opening up ERNIE Bot to the public will enable the company to obtain more human feedback and improve the user experience. He said that ERNIE Bot is a showcase of the four core abilities of generative AI: understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory. He also said that ERNIE Bot can help users with various tasks such as writing, learning, entertainment, and work.

Baidu first unveiled ERNIE Bot in March this year, demonstrating its capabilities in different domains such as literature, art, and science. For example, ERNIE Bot can summarise a sci-fi novel and offer suggestions on how to continue the story in an expanded universe. It can also generate images and videos based on text inputs, such as creating a portrait of a fictional character or a scene from a movie.

Earlier this month, Baidu revealed that ERNIE Bot’s training throughput had increased three-fold since March and that it had achieved new milestones in data analysis and visualisation. ERNIE Bot can now generate results more quickly and handle image inputs as well. For instance, ERNIE Bot can analyse an image of a pie chart and generate a summary of the data in natural language.

Baidu is one of the first Chinese companies to obtain approval from authorities to release generative AI experiences to the public, according to Bloomberg. The report suggests that officials see AI as a “business and political imperative” for China and want to ensure that the technology is used in a responsible and ethical manner.

Beijing is keen on putting guardrails in place to prevent the spread of harmful or illegal content while still enabling Chinese companies to compete with overseas rivals in the field of AI.

Beijing’s AI guardrails

The “guardrails” include the rules published by the Chinese authorities in July 2023 that govern generative AI in China.

China’s rules go substantially beyond current regulations in other parts of the world and aim to ensure that generative AI is used in a responsible and ethical manner. The rules cover various aspects of generative AI, such as content, data, technology, fairness, and licensing.

One notable requirement is that operators of generative AI must ensure that their services adhere to the core values of socialism, while also avoiding content that incites subversion of state power, secession, terrorism, or any actions undermining national unity and social stability.

Generative AI services within China are also prohibited from promoting content that provokes ethnic hatred and discrimination, violence, obscenity, or false and harmful information.

Furthermore, the regulations reveal China’s interest in developing digital public goods for generative AI. The document emphasises the promotion of public training data resource platforms and the collaborative sharing of model-making hardware to enhance utilisation rates. The authorities also aim to encourage the orderly opening of public data classification and the expansion of high-quality public training data resources.

In terms of technology development, the rules stipulate that AI should be developed using secure and proven tools, including chips, software, tools, computing power, and data resources.

Intellectual property rights – an often contentious issue – must be respected when using data for model development, and the consent of individuals must be obtained before incorporating personal information. There is also a focus on improving the quality, authenticity, accuracy, objectivity, and diversity of training data.

To ensure fairness and non-discrimination, developers are required to create algorithms that do not discriminate based on factors such as ethnicity, belief, country, region, gender, age, occupation, or health. Moreover, operators of generative AI must obtain licenses for their services under most circumstances, adding a layer of regulatory oversight.

China’s rules not only have implications for domestic AI operators but also serve as a benchmark for international discussions on AI governance and ethical practices.

(Image Credit: Alpha Photo under CC BY-NC 2.0 license)

See also: OpenAI launches ChatGPT Enterprise to accelerate business operations

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One notable requirement is that operators of generative AI must ensure that their services adhere to the core values of socialism, while also avoiding content that incites subversion of state power, secession, terrorism, or any actions undermining national unity and social stability.

Generative AI services within China are prohibited from promoting content that provokes ethnic hatred and discrimination, violence, obscenity, or false and harmful information. These content-related rules remain consistent with a draft released in April 2023.

Furthermore, the regulations reveal China’s interest in developing digital public goods for generative AI.

The document emphasises the promotion of public training data resource platforms and the collaborative sharing of model-making hardware to enhance utilisation rates. The authorities also aim to encourage the orderly opening of public data classification and the expansion of high-quality public training data resources.

In terms of technology development, the rules stipulate that AI should be developed using secure and proven tools, including chips, software, tools, computing power, and data resources.

Intellectual property rights must be respected when using data for model development, and the consent of individuals must be obtained before incorporating personal information. There is also a focus on improving the quality, authenticity, accuracy, objectivity, and diversity of training data.

To ensure fairness and non-discrimination, developers are required to create algorithms that do not discriminate based on factors such as ethnicity, belief, country, region, gender, age, occupation, or health.

Moreover, operators of generative AI must obtain licenses for their services under most circumstances, adding a layer of regulatory oversight.

The new rules are scheduled to come into effect on August 15, 2023. China’s rules will not only have implications for domestic AI operators but will also serve as a benchmark for international discussions on AI governance and ethical practices.

You can find a full copy of the rules on the Cyberspace Administration of China’s website here.

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See also: OpenAI introduces team dedicated to stopping rogue AI

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The crackdown is focused on news providers, including short video platforms and popular search lists.

The CAC specifically highlighted manipulative practices such as the use of AI virtual anchors, forged studio scenes, fake news accounts mimicking legitimate ones, and the manipulation of news to create misleading storylines. These practices are employed to generate what’s often known as clickbait.

According to the CAC, it has already taken action against 107,000 counterfeit news accounts and fake anchors, as well as removing 835,000 pieces of false information. The internet regulator is urging citizens to report any encounters with fake news accounts online.

In line with China’s AI media law, which aims to curb the spread of fake news generated by AI, the police recently detained an individual in the Gansu province for creating fake news using ChatGPT.

The person used ChatGPT to fabricate a news article about a train crash, which quickly gained traction on social media platforms. The police took action against the individual for spreading false information with the intention of increasing website traffic.

ChatGPT is not available directly in China, but users can access it using a supported foreign phone number and a virtual private network (VPN). However, access to foreign phone numbers and VPNs is restricted in China.

The AI-generated media law, effective since 10 January 2023, not only targets individuals like the one detained in Gansu but also holds “deep synthesis service providers” accountable for preventing the misuse of AI algorithms for illegal activities such as fraud, scams, and the dissemination of fake information.

The implementation of this law poses challenges for companies like Tencent, the developer of WeChat, as they need to ensure their AI algorithms are not misused.

Tencent recently introduced what is essentially a “Deepfakes-as-a-Service” product which enables users to create high-definition digital humans for a fee, raising concerns about the potential misuse of such technology.

The Chinese government’s efforts to combat fake news and regulate online communication highlight its commitment to maintaining a secure and trustworthy digital environment, although concerns about censorship and the restriction of freedom of expression have been raised by critics.

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Baidu is often called the “Google of China” because it offers similar services, including search, maps, email, ads, cloud storage, and more. Baidu, like Google, also invests heavily in AI and machine learning.

Earlier this month, AI News reported that Google was changing its AI review processes to speed up the release of new solutions. One of the first products to be released under Google’s new process is set to be a ChatGPT rival, due to be announced during the company’s I/O developer conference in May.

However, Baidu looks set to beat Google by a couple of months.

Bloomberg reports that Baidu will reveal its own AI-powered chatbot in March. The currently unnamed tool will be integrated into the company’s search product.

Powering the Baidu ChatGPT competitor is ‘ERNIE’ (Enhanced Language RepresentatioN with Informative Entities), a powerful AI model with 10 billion parameters.

Researchers have found that deep-learning models trained on text alone – like OpenAI’s GPT-3 or Google’s T5 – perform well for numerous problems, but can fall short on some natural language understanding (NLU) tasks when the knowledge is not present in the input text.

The first version of ERNIE was introduced and open-sourced in 2019 by researchers at Tsinghua University to demonstrate the NLU capabilities of a model that combines both text and knowledge graph data.

Later that year, Baidu released ERNIE 2.0 which became the first model to set a score higher than 90 on the GLUE benchmark for evaluating NLU systems.

In 2021, Baidu’s researchers posted a paper on ERNIE 3.0 in which they claim the model exceeds human performance on the SuperGLUE natural language benchmark. ERNIE 3.0 set a new top score on SuperGLUE and displaced efforts from Google and Microsoft.

Most of the world’s attention until now has been on language model advancements from the likes of OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. However, Baidu will likely get its time in the spotlight in just a couple of months.

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During a panel at the World Economic Forum, Wray explained that Beijing’s AI program “is not constrained by the rule of law”.

Wray says Beijing has “a bigger hacking program than any other nation” and will use machine learning to further boost the capabilities of its state-sponsored hackers.

Much like nuclear expertise, AI can be used to benefit the world or harm it.

“I have the same reaction every time,” Wray explained. “I think, ‘Wow, we can do that.’ And then, ‘Oh god, they can do that.’”

Beijing is often accused of influencing other countries through its infrastructure investments. Washington largely views China’s expanding economic influence and military might as America’s main long-term security challenge.

Wray says that Beijing’s AI program “is built on top of the massive troves of intellectual property and sensitive data that they’ve stolen over the years.”

Furthermore, it will be used “to advance that same intellectual property theft, to advance the repression that occurs not just back home in mainland China but increasingly as a product they export around the world.”

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince spoke on the same panel and offered a more positive take: “The thing that makes me optimistic in this space: there are more good guys than bad guys.”

Prince acknowledges that whoever has the most data will win the AI race. Western data collection protections have historically been much stricter than in China.

“In a world where all these technologies are available to both the good guys and the bad guys, the good guys are constrained by the rule of law and international norms,” Wray added. “The bad guys aren’t, which you could argue gives them a competitive advantage.”

Prince and Wray say it’s the cooperation of the “good guys” that gives them the best chance at staying a step ahead of those wishing to cause harm.

“When we’re all working together, they’re no match,” concludes Wray.

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Deepfakes are increasingly being used for manipulation and humiliation. We’ve seen deepfakes of figures like disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried to commit fraud, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to spread disinformation, and US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to make her appear drunk.

Last month, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced rules to clampdown on deepfakes.

“In recent years, in-depth synthetic technology has developed rapidly. While serving user needs and improving user experiences, it has also been used by some criminals to produce, copy, publish, and disseminate illegal and bad information, defame, detract from the reputation and honour of others, and counterfeit others,” explains the CAC.

Providers of services for creating synthetic content will be obligated to ensure their AIs aren’t misused for illegal and/or harmful purposes. Furthermore, any content that was created using an AI must be clearly labelled with a watermark.

China’s new rules come into force today (10 January 2023) and will also require synthetic service providers to:

• Not illegally process personal information
• Periodically review, evaluate, and verify algorithms
• Establish management systems and technical safeguards
• Authenticate users with real identity information
• Establish mechanisms for complaints and reporting

The CAC notes that effective governance of synthetic technologies is a multi-entity effort that will require the participation of government, enterprises, and citizens. Such participation, the CAC says, will promote the legal and responsible use of deep synthetic technologies while minimising the associated risks.

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Related: AI & Big Data Expo: Exploring ethics in AI and the guardrails required

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In an SEC filing, NVIDIA says the US government has informed the chipmaker of a new license requirement that impacts two of its GPUs designed to speed up machine learning tasks: the current A100, and the upcoming H100.

“The license requirement also includes any future NVIDIA integrated circuit achieving both peak performance and chip-to-chip I/O performance equal to or greater than thresholds that are roughly equivalent to the A100, as well as any system that includes those circuits,” adds NVIDIA.

The US government has reportedly told NVIDIA that the new rules are geared at addressing the risk of the affected products being used for military purposes.

“While we are not in a position to outline specific policy changes at this time, we are taking a comprehensive approach to implement additional actions necessary related to technologies, end-uses, and end-users to protect US national security and foreign policy interests,” said a US Department of Commerce spokesperson.

China is a large market for NVIDIA and the new rules could affect around $400 million in quarterly sales.

AMD has also been told the new rules will impact its similar products, including the MI200.

As of writing, NVIDIA’s shares were down 11.45 percent from the market open. AMD’s shares are down 6.81 percent. However, it’s worth noting that it’s been another red day for the wider stock market.

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SenseTime is the world’s most-funded AI firm and has attracted large investments in part due to providing technology for the Chinese government’s vast surveillance network.

The company’s Viper system aims to process and analyse over 100,000 simultaneous real-time streams from traffic cameras, ATMs, and more to automatically tag and keep track of individuals.

In 2018 alone, SenseTime raised more than $1.2 billion. Some of its biggest shareholders include SoftBank and Alibaba. Now, the company looks set to open its doors for public investment.

SenseTime received approval for its IPO (Initial Public Offering) from the HKSE this week. The company is said to be planning to start gauging interest as soon as next week, before committing to going ahead with the IPO.

The company’s main three Chinese rivals – CloudWalk, Megvii, and Yitu – are also considering whether to sell shares in mainland China or Hong Kong.

Regulatory crackdowns and ethical concerns

China has been cracking down on where its companies can list, particularly over the past year.

Robotaxi firm Didi, for example, was targeted by Chinese authorities following its $4.4 billion listing on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Chinese regulators forced Apple to remove Didi from the App Store while other app stores operating in China were also ordered not to serve Didi’s app.

Meanwhile, regulators in the West have been increasing their scrutiny of companies that are involved with mass surveillance—especially where there have been accusations of facilitating human rights abuses.

US officials declared that CloudWalk was “complicit in human rights violations and abuses committed in China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labour and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.”

Nicolas Chaillan, the Pentagon’s former chief software officer, resigned in September in protest after claiming the US has “no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years” when it comes to AI.

Chaillan believes part of the problem is the reluctance of US companies such as Google to work with the government on AI due to ethical debates over the technology. In contrast, Chinese firms are obligated to work with their government and have little regard for ethics.

“Chinese AI companies have faced several regulatory challenges but have emerged even stronger. The companies are well placed in key themes such as computer vision, deep learning technologies, smart cities, and autonomous vehicles,” said Priya Toppo, Analyst of Thematic Research at GlobalData, recently.

“The Chinese AI ecosystem will become even stronger as leading companies go public and are able to invest the significant amounts of new capital raised.”

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The third largest cloud services company in China, following Alibaba and Huawei, Tencent recently revealed the three chips at its 2021 Digital Ecology Conference.

Current information on the three chips can be summarised as follows:

• Zixiao – an “AI reasoning” chip that supposedly offers 100 percent better performance than rival products. It combines image and video processing with natural language processing, search recommendations, and other features
• Xuangling – a SmartNIC or Data Processing Unit (DPU) that runs virtualisation of storage and networking for a cloud host’s CPU so that it doesn’t have to. Tencent claims this comes with zero cost to the host CPU and that it performs four times faster than similar industry products
• Canghai – a video transcoding chip that supposedly delivers a 30 percent improved compression rate over other on-market products. It achieves this through multi-core expansion architecture, a high-performance coding pipeline, and a hierarchical memory layout

Whilst these suggested improvements are substantial, the reliability of these figures cannot yet be accounted for.

Their development comes on the back of Tencent establishing a chip research and development lab in Penglai in 2020. Its goal of achieving full end-to-end coverage of Tencent’s chip design and verification appears to have been realised with the announcement.

Tang Daosheng, senior executive VP of Tencent, said at the conference: “Facing strong business needs, Tencent developed a long-term chip research and development investment plan. Currently, it has already implemented three directions with substantial progress.”

Tencent currently operates outside of Asia in the USA, Brazil, Germany, and Russia, with keen plans to expand further into Europe, the Americas, and Africa.

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Research from GlobalData has found that – of the 45 international AI unicorns identified – China has the largest share with 19 based in the country.

Priya Toppo, Analyst of Thematic Research at GlobalData, comments:

“China is a leading player in AI, with a number of established companies such as Baidu, Hikvision, iFlytek, Tencent, and Alibaba.

The country also has a strong AI startup ecosystem, which is evident from the large number of AI unicorns (privately held startup valued at  $1bn or more).” 

Collectively, the Chinese AI unicorns are valued at $43.5 billion.

Beijing has been on a regulatory crackdown in recent months, especially on Chinese companies doing business in, and with, the US.

Robotaxi firm Didi, for example, was targeted by Chinese authorities following its $4.4 billion listing on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Chinese regulators forced Apple to remove Didi from the App Store while other app stores operating in China have also been ordered not to serve Didi’s app.

Despite the crackdowns, AI development in China has remained strong.

Ms Toppa added: “Chinese AI companies have faced several regulatory challenges but have emerged even stronger. The companies are well placed in key themes such as computer vision, deep learning technologies, smart cities, and autonomous vehicles.” 

SenseTime remains China’s biggest AI unicorn with a $12 billion valuation and total funding to date of $2.6 billion. This is followed by CloudWalk’s $3.3 billion valuation and $500 million total funding so far.

CloudWalk recently led in a facial recognition test conducted by the US government’s National Institute of Standards and Technology. However, CloudWalk has faced serious allegations including from US officials who declared the firm was “complicit in human rights violations and abuses committed in China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labour and high-technology surveillance against Uighurs, ethnic Kazakhs, and other members of Muslim minority groups in the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region”.

Other notable Chinese AI unicorns identified in GlobalData’s research include Horizon Robotics with a valuation of $5 billion, Megvii with a valuation of $4 billion, and Yitu Technology with a valuation of $2.2 billion.

“The Chinese AI ecosystem will become even stronger as leading companies go public and are able to invest the significant amounts of new capital raised,” Ms Toppo concludes.

China’s growing dominance in AI has some international competitors worried they’ll be unable to keep pace.

Nicolas Chaillan, the Pentagon’s former chief software officer, recently resigned in protest after claiming the US has “no competing fighting chance against China in 15 to 20 years” when it comes to AI and cyberwarfare.

Chaillan says that China is set to dominate the future of the world, controlling everything from media narratives to geopolitics.

Part of the problem, Chaillan believes, is the reluctance of US companies such as Google to work with the government on AI due to ethical debates over the technology. In contrast, Chinese firms are obligated to work with their government and have little regard for ethics.

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