Chinese coffee chain NOWWA Coffee has teamed up with tech giant Baidu’s GPT-style AI model ERNIE Bot for embedded services on the ERNIE app. ERNIE provides various personae with individual backgrounds and personalities for users to choose from for interaction.
With this collaboration, a NOWWA Coffee AI becomes available on the ERNIE app. Users can interact with the NOWWA chatbot to enquire about coffee-related facts and tips, or even ask for recommendations based on their needs. To boost interest, the NOWWA chatbot will also ‘drop’ vouchers and offers randomly to users.
Baidu just dropped the 4.0 version update of ERNIE Bot last month at their Baidu World conference, claiming that it is on par with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model. Creating posters and videos on prompt and writing a martial arts novel in real time, ERNIE Bot 4.0 is hailed as the most powerful ERNIE model to date, with a 3.6 times better training algorithm. Baidu made a similar claim about their ERNIE 3.5 surpassing ChatGPT back in June.
Testing for the updated version has been open for application since October 28th. One early test result shows that ERNIE 4.0 does not quite rival GPT-4 but does better in localised Chinese internet culture. Baidu recently upgraded the integration of AI into their existing apps such as search and maps, indicating that embedding the ERNIE into the Baidu ecosystem could be how the company gets ahead in AI services.
