China’s own Google — Baidu — has overtaken both Google and Microsoft in understanding human language using artificial intelligence.
Baidu scored an all-time maximum on GLUE (General Language Understanding Evaluation) — the benchmark for AI in understanding human language. This also puts Baidu among the top AI systems that are above the human average of 87.1 on the GLUE benchmark.
Baidu achieved this by developing ERNIE — which built on top of Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model. BERT transformed the natural language understanding industry when it was created. But Enhanced Representation Through Knowledge Integration or ERNIE took things a level further by scoring 90 — the highest score of all time — a position previously held by US firms only.
ERNIE was created initially solely for Mandarin and Cantonese but was later diversified towards understanding English as well — making the algorithm even stronger. Baidu has already put ERNIE to use in improving its search engine and personal assistant.