Baidu's ERNIE Bot Officially Launched: What Can ERNIE Bot Do?
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On August 31, Baidu's ERNIE Bot was fully opened to the public. By noon that day, just 12 hours after its release, the ERNIE Bot app had climbed to the top of the free app rankings on the Apple App Store.
Is this app any good? The proof is in the pudding. A reporter from Modern Express tested it by generating a news article:
—The following was generated by ERNIE Bot—
In the tech world, the latest advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) never fail to excite. This time, Baidu's newly launched AI product, "ERNIE Bot," has once again drawn global attention to China's technological prowess. As an AI language model based on deep learning, ERNIE Bot not only boasts powerful text-processing capabilities but also features unique technical innovations, giving it immense potential in text creation.
According to reports, ERNIE Bot can efficiently generate, understand, and engage in dialogue with text, making it highly versatile across many scenarios. Specifically, it can generate various types of text, including news reports, stories, poems, and even songs and jokes. Additionally, it can understand and answer questions, providing relevant knowledge and information. More impressively, it can engage in conversations, enabling deep interactions with humans.
Baidu stated that ERNIE Bot's core technology is deep learning, with its uniqueness lying in its training on a massive corpus. This allows it not only to handle basic text tasks but also to understand human emotions and intentions, facilitating smooth communication. Furthermore, ERNIE Bot has self-learning and self-updating capabilities, meaning its performance will continue to improve over time.
However, despite ERNIE Bot's impressive performance in many areas, can it fully replace human text creation? Baidu experts say that, at this stage, ERNIE Bot cannot entirely replace humans. While it can generate seemingly natural text, it lacks human creativity and emotional depth. Moreover, it cannot replicate human uniqueness and individuality. Thus, while ERNIE Bot shows promise in text creation, it is still far from fully replacing humans.
In summary, the launch of Baidu's ERNIE Bot undoubtedly marks a new chapter in AI development. As a powerful language model, it demonstrates remarkable capabilities in many areas. Yet, despite rapid advancements in AI, human uniqueness and individuality remain irreplaceable. Moving forward, we look forward to seeing ERNIE Bot and similar AI systems unlock their potential in more fields, collaborating with humans to create a brighter future.
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After testing ERNIE Bot, the Modern Express reporter found it already practical for text creation, meeting basic journalistic standards.
For routine content, it significantly reduces manual labor, generating around 1,000 words in just seconds.
However, when tasked with writing ad copy, short stories, or travel guides, the reporter noticed shortcomings in emotional expression, logical progression, and analytical accuracy.
Particularly in analytical tasks, ERNIE Bot is prone to errors. For example, when asked to create a "5-day Nanjing travel guide," it mistakenly listed "Jinling Academy" as a key attraction. Although the academy shares Nanjing's ancient name "Jinling," it is actually located in Huanggang, Hubei. Clearly, ERNIE Bot still lacks precise factual judgment.
Additionally, its route planning was inconsistent. For neighboring sites like the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum and Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, ERNIE Bot suggested visiting them on separate days.
As ERNIE Bot itself admits, "In areas requiring deep understanding, high specialization, or domain-specific knowledge, it may still face challenges."
Baidu founder, chairman, and CEO Robin Li has stated that once ERNIE Bot serves hundreds of millions of internet users, it will gather vast real-world feedback, further refining its foundational model and accelerating iterations to enhance user experience.
Clearly, ERNIE Bot is still evolving, and its progress will accelerate as its user base grows.
Finally, the reporter posed another question: Can ERNIE Bot replace journalists in the future?
——The following is generated by Wenxin Yiyan——
Although AI technologies such as Wenxin Yiyan are advancing rapidly, replacing journalists remains a distant goal.
First, while AI can process vast amounts of data and information, it lacks human-level understanding of context and environment. Journalists must navigate complex contexts and uncover facts from multiple perspectives—a capability current AI struggles to replicate.
Second, AI lacks human creativity and judgment. Reporting and writing often require these uniquely human traits, which are difficult for AI to simulate.
Additionally, journalism involves interpersonal skills and social responsibility. Journalists interact with diverse individuals, understand their needs and perspectives, and adhere to ethical and legal standards—areas where AI still faces challenges.
Despite rapid progress, fully replacing journalists remains unrealistic. In the future, AI may serve as a valuable tool to assist journalists in gathering information and drafting reports more efficiently, but the role and value of human journalists will remain irreplaceable.
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Good, feeling reassured. Time to clock out.