Baidu, Inc., a leading AI company with strong internet foundation, announced a significant expansion of ERNIE Bot, Baidu’s knowledge-enhanced large language model (LLM), at the Wave Summit Deep Learning Developer Conference 2023 held yesterday. With the addition of five native plugins, ERNIE Bot can now generate more rapid results, process long documents, conduct data analysis and visualization, interact with image inputs, and convert text into video. Since its debut in March 2023, ERNIE Bot has increased its training throughput 3-fold and boosted inference throughput by over 30 times.
Other major announcements revealed at Wave Summit 2023 include the latest update to Baidu’s PaddlePaddle deep learning platform, which has engaged eight million developers, served 220,000 enterprises, and housed 800,000 models; the release of AI-native application InfoFlow, poised to redefine how businesses and developers interact with AI; and the availability of Baidu Comate AI coding assistant to enterprise developers.
In his keynote speech at the event, Baidu CTO Haifeng Wang said that the core abilities of understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory in AI bring humanity closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI). LLMs possessing these abilities herald a new dawn for AGI.
Powered by innovative training techniques and massive datasets – containing trillions of data points and hundreds of billions of knowledge facts – ERNIE Bot has made substantial progress in recent months, allowing it to more fully harness these abilities. It has now gained high-level proficiency in over 200 genres of writing, a 1.6-fold increase in content quality since its debut in March. Other noteworthy improvements include a 2.1-fold increase in chain-of-thought, allowing for more in-depth reasoning, and an 8.3-fold expansion in knowledge scope, broadening ERNIE Bot’s overall comprehension.
New ERNIE Bot Plugins Broaden Functionalities
ERNIE Bot has added five plugins to meet diverse demands and enable a multitude of use cases. Speaking at Wave Summit 2023, Baidu Corporate Vice President Tian Wu explained that this expansion is expected to broaden ERNIE Bot’s functionalities, with support for up to three plugins simultaneously. The new additions include:
- Baidu Search: Offers seamless integration with Baidu Search, delivering timely and precise results.
- ChatFile: Facilitates conversational interactions based on long documents.
- Data Analytics & Visualization: Automatically crafts insightful data charts and visualizations such as word clouds.
- Visual Interaction: Supports dialogues that incorporate image content and context.
- Text-to-Video: Transforms text descriptions into engaging videos.
At the event, Baidu also issued an invitation to developers to test the LLM plugins, offering participating developers a toolkit for plugin development.
New Community Brings Together Foundation Model Developers
Tian revealed that Baidu’s AI Studio (Xinghe Community) has now become China’s largest AI community, with over 6.09 million development projects. With the growing interest in foundation models (FMs), AI Studio has launched its AI Studio FM Community to offer an integrated development experience. The community now has more than 300 innovative FM applications.
At the summit, Baidu also announced the launch of the AI Studio Co-Creation Plan to foster AI applications in collaboration with developers.
PaddlePaddle Upgrades Open-Source Framework to V2.5
The underlying deep learning platform PaddlePaddle has been instrumental in the rapid advances made by ERNIE Bot. For example, ERNIE Bot’s leapfrog increases in training throughput and inference throughput were enabled by the implementation of PaddlePaddle’s adaptive hybrid parallel training technologies and optimizations across model compression, inference, and deployment.
Yanjun Ma, General Manager of the AI Technology Ecosystem at Baidu, announced that as PaddlePaddle’s open-source framework has been upgraded to version 2.5. It has gained a new architecture with improved differential functions and general performance optimizations. Baidu also launched PaddleScience v1.0 as PaddlePaddle’s AI-driven scientific computing toolkit. In addition, PaddleHelix, its bio-computing tool, released HelixDock, a large protein-compound conformation affinity prediction model.
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Next-Gen AI-Native Applications Redefine Workspace
LLMs like ERNIE Bot are bringing unprecedented changes to enterprise workspace and collaboration. For example, the Baidu InfoFlow “Super Assistant”, unveiled at Wave Summit 2023 by Baidu Corporate Vice President and CIO Ying Li, can automate enterprise operations like task management, document processing, conversational Business Intelligence, and work communications, reducing completion times from hours to minutes or even seconds.
Baidu also announced the launch of Baidu Comate, its in-house developed AI coding assistant. Baidu Comate provides smart recommendations and generation of code, comments, tests, and documentation to boost R&D efficiency across over 30 programming languages and over 10 IDEs. As the first commercial full-scenario AI coding assistant developed in China, Baidu Comate is now officially open to enterprise developers.
Baidu’s announcements at Wave Summit 2023 reflect the dawn of a new era in AI technology and development. Through these innovative products and community engagements, Baidu continues to demonstrate its commitment to driving technological advancement and empowering developers and businesses worldwide.
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