Chinese Momentum

First there was DeepSeek, the Chinese company, which came out of the blue and yanked away the idea that the artificial intelligence (AI) era would be dominated by the US. Now, close on its heels, Baidu, the online search company, has announced the launch of two AI products, which are claimed to be at the forefront of what is on offer worldwide and also much cheaper. The models are called Ernie X1 and a superior Ernie 4.5 which it says “has more advanced language ability, and its understanding, generation, logic, and memory abilities are comprehensively improved.” Baidu, however, is not a surprise entrant like DeepSeek. Two years ago, it announced a competitor to ChatGPT with the first iteration of Ernie but it was something of a dampener. The demonstration of its abilities turned out to be pre-recorded and the company’s stock price immediately went down. But how much the attitude towards China’s AI capabilities has changed was evident when, after the present announcement, Baidu’s stocks shot up by more than 10 per cent. There are also other Chinese companies like Alibaba, their equivalent of Amazon, on top of the AI revolution.

Paper Wonder

Ever since Google released AI co-scientist, a virtual collaborator to help scientists generate hypotheses and research proposals, there has been a lot of expectations about how AI would transform scientific research. Earlier this month, a research paper written by Autoscience’s AI system Carl was accepted at a conference. Now the AI system of another startup, Japan’s Sakana, has been able to generate scientific papers that have passed peer review.

Machine Learning

AI spotting early onset of disease is one field in medical science where it will play, researchers believe, a transformative role. One such disease is dementia. Researchers from the Mass General Birmingham in the US have demonstrated how an AI tool built by them can predict the future risk of cognitive impairment, including dementia, through data captured on a wearable EEG device.

Game On

A leaked video showed Sony has developed an AI powered-version of a character, Aloy, for its PlayStation game Horizon Forbidden West. It can converse with players and uses OpenAI’s whisper for speech-to-text, both GPT-4 and Llama 3 for conversations and decision-making, and Sony’s own internal Emotional Voice Synthesis (EVS) system for speech generation. It could be seen responding to queries with an AI-powered synthesised voice and facial movements.

AI productsartificial intelligenceBaiduSearch gianttechnologyvirtual collaborator