We asked GPT-4 and Chinese rival ERNIE the same questions. Here’s how they answered

ERNIE Bot, China’s newly upgraded answer to GPT-4, can do a lot of things.

ERNIE Bot 4.0, run by Chinese tech giant Baidu, is touted to be in the same league as industry darling chatbot GPT-4. Unveiled in October and launched to paying subscribers in November, ERNIE 4.0, an upgraded version of Baidu’s first ChatGPT competitor, “is not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4,” Baidu’s (BIDU) billionaire CEO Robin Li has said. We tested each bot by entering written prompts in its primary language. ERNIE is mainly designed to be used in Chinese, though it can handle English queries at a less advanced level. GPT-4 is optimized for use in English, but it can also take questions in other languages, such as German. Here’s what we found: ERNIE beat GPT-4 on certain prompts, such as those related to current affairs. The Chinese bot knew that Taylor Swift is now a billionaire, that China had recently removed its defense minister and that “Friends” star Matthew Perry had died.