Baidu Inc (百度) debuted China’s answer to ChatGPT in a prerecorded video, disappointing those hoping for a stronger, real-life demo of the country’s highest-profile entry in a race with the US to dominate the transformative technology.
Billionaire founder Robin Li (李彥宏) took to a Beijing stage to introduce his company’s Ernie Bot, a landmark moment for a search leader that has struggled in recent years to revitalize growth.
However, instead of putting the service through its paces in real time, he talked over a scripted video of interactions with the artificial intelligence (AI) bot.
Photo: AP
Baidu’s shares fell as much as 10 percent in afternoon trading in Hong Kong, wiping out more than US$4 billion of its value.
The omission raises questions over Ernie’s ability to match OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has impressed and worried users since its launch in November last year.
“It looks prerecorded, and so far it’s all just PowerPoints. The demos did not look spontaneous,” Shenzhen Qianhai United Fortune Fund Management Co (深圳前海聯合財富管理基金) chief investment director Yu Yingbo (於英波) said.
“He’s not citing anything on the database they are drawing from, or their model, or how it compares to ChatGPT. It’s all really vague and theoretical,” he said.
Baidu opened registration for consumers and cloud clients to access the AI chatbot yesterday, but did not say when they could actually use the service.
“I can’t say we are fully ready. Benchmarking Ernie Bot against ChatGPT, or even GPT-4, is a high bar,” Li told reporters.
“None of the big tech firms globally has made it. Baidu is the first one,” he said, adding that his own testing experience showed the product “isn’t perfect.”
Yesterday’s letdown casts a pall over the potential for China to contribute to a technological revolution analysts have said could dwarf the mobile age.
Some of the questions posed in Baidu’s videos appeared rudimentary and addressable by typical search engine services, such as: “Which part of China does The Three-Body Problem author come from?”
Many users took to Chinese social media to poke fun at yesterday’s event, with one user calling it a “low-energy” debut.
Baidu and its Chinese peers would have to contend with growing US restrictions on the export of US technology, including the highest-end Nvidia Corp processors needed to train AI models.
It is unclear how those might impact development in the longer run, yet experts anticipate that China can come up with substitutes or find workarounds.
Baidu is planning to embed Ernie Bot into all of its main operations, from its flagship search app to cloud computing and autonomous-driving software.
Partners from vehicle makers to news sites also said they would use Baidu’s tool in their businesses.
Earlier this week, Baidu told some of its 40,000 workers to participate in a trial run of Ernie Bot under confidentiality agreements, employees who got the invitation said.
Such testing could offer crucial last-minute feedback to fine-tune the AI before its rollout.
The consequences of a botched launch could be dire. Shares of Google owner Alphabet Inc plunged last month after its Bard answered incorrectly during a demonstration, sparking concerns it had fallen technologically behind.
On Wednesday, OpenAI unveiled a new language model underpinning its seminal ChatGPT, saying it would improve accuracy and safety of the tool.
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