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Baidu Conquers The Next-Gen AI Race By Beating Tech Giants in a Language Test

Baidu, which is often termed as China’s Google, surpassed traditional players when it comes to AI and language learning. It has achieved the highest ever score in the General Language Understanding Evaluation (GLUE), which has been widely considered to be the benchmark for AI language comprehension skills. For most humans, the managed score is usually an 87 out of 100, however, Baidu’s model, called ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through knowledge Integration has scored a 90, which is a first for any AI models. This model was initially developed to understand the Chinese language but researchers soon realised its ability to understand English as well.

Behind The Scenes

ERNIE was completely inspired by Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), a “masked” language model, created in 2018, used to train AI to understand human language. ...

While, Google’s model hides 15 per cent of the words in each sequence and then tries to predict them based on the context, the scene for Baidu is completely different. This is because, many Chinese characters do not have an inherent meaning until they are strung together with other characters, which is a key linguistic difference from English, and therefore Baidu’s team need to take steps further in training its AI model to better understand a way to hide a string of meaningful characters and predict the masked ones. The company has already started to use the model in order to improve results for its search engine and make its AI assistant Xiao Du more accurate.

...Baidu comprehends meaningful words instead of individual characters and therefore performing better in both English as well as Chinese.

Business Prospect

Baidu, with a total of 5712 AI-related patents, is currently at an expanding mode different sectors like virtual assistants, smart speakers and autonomous cars. The company’s patent applications were followed by Tencent (4,115), Microsoft (3,978), Inspur (3,755), and Huawei (3,656), according to the report issued by theChina Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, a research unit under the MIIT. The report also mentioned how Baidu is leading the patent application in several key areas of AI, which include deep learning (1,429), NLP (938), and speech recognition (933). The company also leads in the highly competitive area of intelligent driving, with 1,237 patent applications.

See the full story here: https://analyticsindiamag.com/baidu-conquers-the-next-gen-ai-race-by-beating-tech-giants-in-a-language-test/