Samsung Adds Baidu's Ernie In China, Google Bard Not Available In The Region

Samsung Electronics launched its Galaxy S24 series phone in China and announced it would use Baidu’s Ernie AI to power features such as translation and summaries. 

There is no mention of the Google Gemini model, which powers the Bard Chatbot and previously launched in Western markets, but is not available in China.

Baidu claims that Ernie 4.0 -- which launched in October -- is the most powerful foundation model to date.

It has the full capabilities of understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory -- which provides Samsung mobile handset users with more features as well as support for advertisers looking to serve a variety of media on the phone. The company also claimed it has capabilities as advanced as those of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

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“It has been significantly improved compared to the online version of Ernie bot and now it is not inferior to GPT-4,” CEO Robin Li during the Baidu World 2023 event in October, CNBC reported.

In November during the company's earnings announcement, it said that it launched Ernie 4.0 and Ernie Bot to "reinvent" its consumer-facing and enterprise-facing products, as well as its own operations, providing AI-native experiences yo drive gains and efficiencies. At the time, the company opened its Ernie API to cloud enterprises, so others can build applications.

Rong Luo, CFO of Baidu, wrote in a statement that the company's "ongoing investments in AI have underpinned technological and product innovations, and that the company will prioritize investments in AI, especially in generative AI and foundation models.

By the end of December Baidu reportedly announced that its Ernie bot had surpassed 100 million users just four months after the company released its chatbot to the public.

The phone can also turn spoken words into written text, identify who speaks into the phone, and translate between different languages. 

The latest Samsung Galaxy S24 series features Google’s AI model Gemini outside of China because of a firewall blocking Google, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and other mainstream sites on the mainland, according to TechNode.

While Google Bard is not available on Samsung phones in China, an interesting feature will become available globally on the Galaxy S24 Series phones called Circle to Search, a Google product that allows users to search for things in texts, images, audio, or videos with gestures.

Samsung and Baidu have been working together since 2019 building semiconductor chips in a new foundry service.

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