Zhijiang, China – March 16, 2023: View of the logo of Ernie Bot, an AI chatbot service developed by Chinese search engine Baidu, on March 16, 2023.
Long wei | Future Publishing | Getty Images
Shares of Chinese tech giant Baidu were up 10.7% in Asia on Tuesday. This is because investors appeared to be actively responding to the release of two new AI models over the weekend.
Baidu released two new artificial intelligence models on Sunday. This includes the latest version of the basic “Ernie” model and a new inference model that rivals Deepseek’s R1 model. CNBC is unable to verify these claims.
An inference model is a large language model designed to handle complex problems in the same way as humans, breaking down the prompts into smaller pieces and examining multiple approaches before generating a response.
According to Kaiwan, a senior equity analyst at Morningstar, Stock Jump is likely a “delayed response” to the new model as Biz is becoming a Nsa to help Baidu regain its major position in the Chinese AI space.
“Stock prices don’t bring as much love as other hyperschools, but they’re still a platform that’s supposed to benefit from greater AI demand as companies need people to support the power of hosting, scaling and computing,” he said.
Hyperscalar refers to major cloud computing companies that provide large data centers for computing storage and demand.
Baidu said on Sunday that Ernie X1’s inference model “provides performance at half the average price with the Deepseek R1,” and that it has “more powerful understanding, planning, reflection and evolutionary capabilities.”
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek overturned the AI industry in January and released the R1 open source inference model.
Deepseek quickly overtaked Baidu in the Chinese AI race, despite being one of the first markets to launch a chatbot like AIR bots and ChatGpt. Alibaba And it’s pulling first too.
“Baidu’s competitiveness depends on whether the new model truly realizes the promised performance and cost benefits,” Sun said.
The latest Baidu model is now available for free for individual users. Previously, users would pay a monthly subscription to access the company’s latest Ernie model.
Last month, the company announced that it will become the next-generation AI model, Ernie Open-Source, from June 30th. According to Reuters. This represents a shift from Baidu’s previous strategy of focusing on its own model.
“By open-sourcing the model, Baidu is once again positioning its technology as an industry standard, strengthening its influence in the AI community and increasing its market share,” Sun said.
Fix: This article has been updated to state that Baidu’s new AI model is free to use.
