On September 1, the signing ceremony for strategic cooperation between the National Library of China (NLC) and Baidu was held at the NLC. At the event, Zhang Zhiqing, Executive Deputy Director of the NLC, and Wu Tian, Vice President of Baidu, jointly signed a strategic cooperation agreement. The signing ceremony was presided over by Shen Xiaojuan, Director of the NLC Research Institute.

The signing of the agreement marks a good beginning for Baidu and the NLC to establish a cooperative relationship. According to the agreement, both parties will work together and share high-quality resources, fully leverage their respective advantages in resource, technology, and service, strengthen communication and interaction, promote the implementation of smart library applications, strive to improve the quality of public cultural services, jointly promote the smart services of national cultural resource and knowledge to the public, so as to boost cultural confidence through technological innovation, and help build a cultural power.

Zhang Zhiqing said, as early as the establishment of Metropolitan Library—the predecessor of the NLC—in 1909, scholars had pointed out that libraries and the development of civilization have always been linked. Throughout its 114-year development, the NLC has always been a symbol of Chinese culture and a highland of Chinese civilization. At the beginning of the 14th Five Year Plan period, the NLC proposed to build a National Smart Library System, which aims to enhance the knowledge organization, processing, storage, dissemination, and service capabilities of national libraries through the widespread application of technologies such as 5G, big data, cloud computing, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. Actively promoting the improvement of library knowledge service capabilities is an important means for promoting high-quality transformation and innovation of the NLC and the national librarianship during the 14th Five Year Plan period. The NLC signing strategic cooperation agreement with Baidu in areas such as Library Intelligent Question Answering System, is a step to leverage their respective advantages, share high-quality resources and technologies, deeply integrate AI technology with the library, and enable the library to serve the entire society more extensive and more conveniently, allowing more people to benefit from the power of knowledge and technology, and making the Chinese civilization to once again bloom with brilliant flowers and bear rich fruits.

Since the beginning of this year, the Big Model has become a hot topic among the public. Baidu released "ERNIE Bot" on March 16 and offered beta invitation. As the first generative AI product released among the world's major manufacturers, the basic model of ERNIE Bot—ERNIE-SAT—was first released in China as early as 2019, and the recently upgraded ERNIE 3.5 big model ranks top in more than 10 authoritative evaluations at home and abroad. On August 31, ERNIE Bot was open to the entire society. Users can download the ERNIE Bot APP in the app store or log on to the official website (https://yiyan.baidu.com) to try it. It is reported that Baidu will also release a few newly restructured born-AI applications, allowing users to fully experience the four core capabilities of generative AI: understanding, generation, logic, and memory. After ERNIE Bot is open to hundreds of millions of Internet users, it can obtain a great amount of artificial feedback in the real world, which will help further improve the basic model, and iterate ERNIE Bot faster to create better user experience.

Wu Tian said, "The richer and better the content of Big Model, the better the efficiency and effect of learning. The strategic cooperation between the NLC and Baidu will further strengthen the knowledge enhancement feature of ERNIE Bot, activate the value of classic cultural resources, and enable ERNIE Bot to imperceptibly inherit Chinese culture and Chinese wisdom in the process of providing services to users. ERNIE Bot has demonstrated mature service capabilities in many scenarios, such as intelligent customer service, intelligent office and intelligent marketing. Baidu looks forward to continuous and in-depth cooperation with the NLC to jointly promote the inheritance of culture."