HONG KONG, June 27 (Reuters) – Baidu Inc (9888.HK), , China's leading search engine provider, said the latest iteration of its ChatGPT-style service had surpassed the widely popular Microsoft-backed OpenAI chatbot on multiple key metrics. Baidu said in a statement on Tuesday that Ernie 3.5, the latest version of its Ernie AI model, had surpassed "ChatGPT in comprehensive ability scores" and outperformed "GPT-4 in several Chinese capabilities". The Beijing-based company cited a test that the state newspaper China Science Daily ran using datasets including AGIEval and C-Eval, two benchmarks used to evaluate the performance of artificial intelligence (AI) models. OpenAI…