Chinese tech firm Baidu on Thursday unveiled its long-awaited AI-powered chatbot known as the Ernie Bot, but it disappointed investors with its use of pre-recorded video and lack of a public launch, sending its shares tumbling.
Unlike ChatGPT, its more famous rival that launched last November as a free-to-the-public chatbot, Baidu limited its presentation to short videos showing Ernie doing math calculations, speaking Chinese dialects, and generating a video and image with text of prompts.
The program will only be available for testing to an initial group of users with invite codes starting Thursday, while companies can apply to embed the bot into their products through the company’s cloud platform.
Shares of Baidu in Hong Kong dropped as much as 10% and closed 6.4% lower, losing more than $3 billion in market valuation.
During the presentation at Baidu’s Beijing headquarters, which also broadcast live on nine platforms, CEO Robin Li warned that it wasn’t perfect. “So why are we revealing it today? Because the market demands it,” he said.
Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the stock crash, but released a statement after the filing saying that more than 30,000 business users had signed up to test the business-oriented edition of the Ernie Bot API and that traffic to Baidu’s API cloud site has skyrocketed.
Li nodded to GPT-4 during his speech, saying it surprised him with its ability to summarize information, but cautioned against interpreting it through the lens of geopolitics.
“The Ernie Bot is not a comparison tool between China and the United States,” he said. So far, 650 companies have said they will join the Ernie ecosystem, she added.
Source: Terra
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