Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU and HKEX: 9888 (HKD Counter) and 89888 (RMB Counter)) (“Baidu” or the “Company”), a leading AI company with strong Internet foundation, has become aware of media reports regarding an academic paper that mentioned several large language models (“LLM”) such as GPT3.5, GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT4, HTML-T5, and Baidu’s ERNIE Bot and would like to offer the following clarifications.

ERNIE Bot is available to and used by the general public. The academic paper, published by scholars at a Chinese university, described how the authors built prompts and received responses from LLMs, using the functions available to any user interacting with generative AI tools. Baidu has not engaged in any business collaboration or provided any tailored service to authors of the academic paper or any institutions with which they are affiliated. The South China Morning Post, the first media outlet that reported on this academic paper, has clarified and corrected their original media report.

The Company is committed to operating its AI related products and businesses in compliance with applicable laws and regulations and best corporate practices.