Baidu’s Ernie artificial intelligence program has dethroned Google to take Artificial intelligence language competition crown. The win has strengthened Baidu’s commitment to integrating AI into its search algorithms.
Baidu is this year’s winner of the artificial intelligence language crown beating other top tech companies such as Google and Microsoft. The competition was designed to test how a machine can understand the human language.
Baidu wins the competition
Baidu received the highest scores in the General Language Understanding Evaluation (Glue). This was a major statement from the company on the investment they are making in the field of machine learning. The firm, which is referred to as Google of China, has been on a journey of integrating machine learning on its search algorithms.
This was the first time that a machine learning model was able to score over 90 percent. They used Ernie (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration) to topple the leaderboard that had previously been dominated by US tech companies and universities. They also joined a list of the only 10 machine learning programs to have outscored the average human score of 87.1 Glue result.
Ernie used the same process used by Google’s Bert (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) model to understand the natural language. Both machine language programs also share a common name origin, which was from sesame characters.
Baidu stated that they first developed Ernie to learn Chinese. After a successful deployment of the machine language with the Chinese language, the developers were then able to integrate it for learning the English language. The developers claimed that they were surprised by the ease the program took to learn English.
Further results of the research are expected to be released in 2020. The report will detail how Baidu was able to teach Ernie to learn English and the effort that went into developing the machine learning program.
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