On Monday, Baidu Group's stock price plummeted by over 11%, attracting high market attention. Yesterday evening, the company issued a clarification notice stating that it has not collaborated with or provided any customized services to the author of the academic paper.
According to yesterday's announcement, Baidu Group has learned that an academic paper reported by the media mentions several large language models ("LLMs") such as GPT3.5, GPT-3.5 turbo, GPT4, HTML-T5, and Baidu ERNIE Bot, and hopes to provide some clarification. The ERNIE Bot is available for public use, and this academic paper published by Chinese university scholars only describes how the author utilizes the functionality of any user interacting with generative artificial intelligence tools to construct prompts and receive responses from LLM.
Note: Announcement from Baidu Group
Baidu stated in its announcement that the company has not engaged in any business cooperation or provided any customized services with the authors of academic papers or any of their affiliated institutions. The media that first reported this academic paper has clarified and corrected their initial media coverage. The company is committed to operating its artificial intelligence related products and businesses in compliance with applicable laws, regulations, and best enterprise practices.
Previously, there were media reports that a domestic research laboratory was testing AI systems on Baidu Wenxin's big model and iFlytek's Starfire model. There is speculation in the market that the US government may take sanctions against Baidu due to this report.
Stimulated by the above news, Baidu Group's Hong Kong stock market plummeted by 11.53% yesterday, dragging down the technology index. Today, the stock price showed a slight rebound. As of publication, it rose 3.38% to HKD 103.9.
Some institutions have pointed out that the above incident is an overreaction from the market. For example, UBS stated that investors may have overreacted to the news and maintained their "buy" rating, while Haitong International and Yamato have similar views.
Recently, Baidu Group released the Wenxin Big Model 4.0
In fact, ERNIE Bot has become one of the important projects of Baidu Group. As Robin Lee, the founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, said on the third quarterly report conference call, Baidu is reconstructing its advertising system with Wenxin model, including generative creativity, generative orientation and other services. These measures are expected to bring hundreds of millions of yuan in incremental revenue in the fourth quarter.
As of now, the Wenxin model has been iterated to version 4.0, and its four major abilities of understanding, generation, logic, and memory have been significantly improved. The Chinese comprehensive ability may reach a level similar to GPT-4.
Everbright Overseas pointed out that the Wenxin model can help enhance Baidu's core competitiveness in the AI field, and is expected to reshape multiple businesses including advertising and cloud, expanding the company's revenue imagination space.