October 3, 2024
Baidu denies report that its Ernie AI chatbot is linked to Chinese language navy analysis
Expertise firm Baidu on Monday refuted a newspaper report that mentioned its synthetic intelligence chatbot Ernie was linked to Chinese language navy analysis. Hong Kong newspaper South China Morning Publish on Friday cited a tutorial paper from a college affiliated with the Individuals’s Liberation Military cyberwarfare division. The paper acknowledged that the division had examined its synthetic intelligence system on Baidu’s Ernie and on synthetic intelligence agency iFlyTek’s Spark, each of that are language-based AI chatbots much like ChatGPT.

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After its Hong Kong-listed inventory plunged greater than 11.5 per cent on Monday, Baidu denied the allegations, saying in a press release that it had not engaged in a enterprise collaboration with the paper’s authors or their affiliated establishments.

“Ernie Bot is accessible to and utilized by most people,” the Chinese language firm mentioned in its assertion. The tutorial paper from the PLA Info Engineering College detailed how researchers had given Ernie Bot prompts to generate simulated navy response plans for Libyan troops in response to a US navy assault.

Baidu mentioned that if the authors employed massive language fashions akin to Ernie Bot, they’d have used the capabilities obtainable to any person interacting with such AI instruments.

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Like ChatGPT, customers can pose questions or requests to Ernie Bot, which might then generate content material based mostly on the preliminary immediate. Like many different web companies in China, Ernie Bot can be topic to censorship guidelines and won’t reply questions deemed politically delicate or taboo by the Chinese language authorities. The South China Morning Publish report initially described a “bodily hyperlink” between Ernie and the PLA division. The reference has since been amended to say that the PLA lab had examined its system on Baidu’s AI mannequin.

The plunge in Baidu’s inventory worth underscored fears from buyers that Chinese language know-how companies linked to the Chinese language navy or authorities may very well be sanctioned by the US in a similar way to Chinese language telecommunications big Huawei, which the US sees as an espionage threat.

Relations between China and the US have declined lately over disagreements on commerce, know-how and points associated to Taiwan, a self-ruled island and US ally that China regards as a renegade province to be taken by power if obligatory.

Baidu, which operates China’s main search engine and is among the nation’s main synthetic intelligence companies, made Ernie Bot obtainable to the general public in August 2023 amid a race amongst Chinese language know-how companies to supply China’s ChatGPT equal.

The Beijing-headquartered agency mentioned in December that it had greater than 100 million customers for Ernie Bot.