Robin Li: These are very good questions. When it comes to foundation model in China, ERNIE 3.5 clearly stands out people have witnessed the fast iteration and improvement over the past five, six months. Our unique full-stack AI capabilities differentiate us from our competitors and give us an edge in the market. As mentioned in my prepared remarks, an IDC report recently published or named ERNIE 3.5 as a leader across various assets. Like many other technologies, foundation model, speed of innovation depends on the application that uses model. Baidu is an AI company with a strong portfolio of Internet products, these products are all being reviewed and reconstructed with ERNIE Bot, therefore, drive the innovation of ERNIE into the right direction.
In our work, we know what kind of problem to solve. And I think many other peers don’t really know they just open domain testing sets to evaluate the effectiveness of their models. We also have tens of thousands of cloud customers testing our ERNIE Bot. They provide valuable feedbacks that propel the improvement to. As for the industry-specific models you mentioned, they should be built upon the most powerful foundation model. I think that — with time, foundation models are rapidly evolve given its strong capabilities to learn new subjects and gain industry insights. And the stand-alone industry-specific models will have a hard time to keep up with the pace of innovation. In fact, since ERNIE 3.5 became available, an increasing number of customers have told us that ERNIE 3.5 is visibly more advanced than ERNIE 3.0 and it has helped them solve a growing number of pain points.
And as you can imagine, we are working towards ERNIE 4.0 and should launch it by the end of the year. I believe that ultimately, only a select few companies will reach this level of advancement for foundation models and Baidu will be one of them. During this transitional period, we are focused on multiple initiatives to drive the adoption of foundation model. We’re working hard to build early power applications and solutions for different industries and the scenarios Baidu Comet exception example. And with the upgrade to ERNIE 3.5, we are swiftly rolling out to empower enterprises to create industry-specific models and applications that tackle their own challenges. Also, we offer mass platform, which includes not only ERNIE, but also a variety of models.
This allows businesses to easily view, fine tune and operate their own models using their own data. We provide a set of valuable tools on our platform, enabling our customers to easily enhance their model, training and application development. Of course, enterprises can directly access ERNIE’s capabilities through API to enhance their businesses. Recognizing that in the early stages, enterprises prioritize security. So we do provide the flexibility of using our foundation model services on both public and private cloud. Our self-developed four-layer AI architecture is our core competitive advantage, because we deliver a better model performance when we serve our customers as shown in the testing phase over the past few months. Our strength is in model training efficiency and cost effectiveness in turn attract more enterprises to partner with us.
So we gain more and more industry know-how and insight and building a reinforcing positive cycle to further improve ERNIE. Our ultimate goal is to cultivate an AI-native ecosystem centered around ERNIE. We believe that the true power of foundation model lies in driving a wide array of high-quality AI native applications, much like an operating system. Some of the applications are built by us, while others were built by, I would say, most will be built by our ecosystem partner to address industry-specific challenges. To enhance this ecosystem, we’re happy to invest in other companies to complement our organic growth. Just as I mentioned in the prepared remarks, we hosted Baidu ERNIE Cup Innovation Challenge and large venture fund to support startups in developing all kind of AI native applications.
To sum up, we will continue to improve ERNIE, means ERNIE easy to use and help enterprises in any industry to not only retain or fine tune models on top of ERNIE, but more importantly, leverage ERNIE and ERNIE Bot to develop their own application. We aim to make ERNIE the preferred choice among AI developers, so that more and more applications will be built upon ERNIE and making our ecosystem vibrant. Thank you.
Operator: The next question comes from Miranda Zhuang with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Miranda Zhuang: Thank you. Good evening, management. Thanks for taking my question. So lately, open source AI models have attracting significant market attention. So can management provide your insights into Baidu’s perspectives on this front and the strategy regarding the open source versus the closed AI models? Thanks.
