China Review – March 16, 2023: Ernie Bot’s logo, an AI chatbot service developed by Chinese search engine Baidu, March 16, 2023.
Changwei | Future Publishing | Getty Images
Shares of Chinese tech giants Baidu It rose 10.7% in Asia as investors appeared to be reacting positively to the launch of two new AI models over the weekend.
Baidu released two new AI models on Sunday, including the latest version of its underlying “Ernie” model and the new inference model it says is comparable to DeepSeek’s R1 model. CNBC cannot verify these claims.
one Inference Model is a large language model designed to handle complex problems in a similar way to humans, splitting cues into smaller pieces and considering multiple approaches before generating a response.
According to Kai Wang, senior equity analyst at Morningstar, the stock’s jump could be a “delay reaction” to new models as Baidu competes to regain its lead in China’s AI field.
“The stock also doesn’t have the love of other super-raters, but it’s still a platform that can benefit from larger AI needs, as businesses will need someone to help them host, scale and compute power,” he said.
Super Standard refers to major cloud computing companies that provide a large number of data centers for computing storage and demand.
Baidu said on Sunday that its Ernie X1 inference model “provides performance with the DeepSeek R1 at only half the price” and has “a stronger understanding, planning, reflection and evolutionary capability.” Reuters’ report.
When Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek released the R1 open source inference model in January, it upended the AI industry, which rivals the model of U.S. rivals, despite claiming it is a fraction of the cost and much more powerful.
According to Wei Sun, chief analyst for AI research at Counterpoint Research, DeepSeek quickly surpassed the Chinese AI competition, although the company is one of the first companies on the market to launch a chatbot similar to Chatgpt with Ernie Bot. Alibaba And the barbarians also moved forward.
“Baidu’s competitiveness depends on whether its new model really brings the promised performance and cost advantage,” Sun said.
Baidu’s latest model is similar to DeepSeek’s R1 and has been released as open source, meaning that the source code is freely used on the Open Web for modification and redistribution.
This represents a change in Baidu’s strategy that has previously focused on proprietary models.
“With open models, Baidu is trying to position its technology as an industry standard again, strengthening its reach in the AI community and expanding its market share,” Sun said.
