Baidu’s artificial intelligence Ernie seems to have disappointed users and shareholders, who lowered the share price after the official presentation
Shares of Baidu fell nearly 10% after the public unveiling of Ernie Bot, its AI solution to compete with ChatGPT. The company played a recorded video demonstrating how artificial intelligence works, but investors weren’t too happy.
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With millions of people tuning into the event, there was a widespread sense of distrust of the chatbot’s capabilities. Many people wondered if the technology would be able to compete with ChatGPT because it looked too simple, almost like a regular chatbot.
Baidu CEO and founder Robin Li was in charge of the presentation. A screen showed the chat window open and the executive read some of the questions asked by the chatbot. The problem is that everything seemed too staged, after all it was just a demo recorded before the event.
The disappointment is seen in the live comments during the WeChat broadcast. It didn’t take long for the share price to start falling and the same viewers highlighted it in the live broadcast.
development problems
According to the Financial Times newspaper, employees have even complained about the launch, which allegedly cost millions of dollars diverted from other features. Baidu had to upgrade several servers with Baidu’s powerful A100 chips nvidia to support artificial intelligence and everything was done quickly, as the Chinese would be far behind in terms of technology.
The British newspaper also mentioned possible flaws in the training of the model, which needs to receive millions of inputs to learn how to answer questions correctly. Since time was short, the developers would only have made fine-tuning based on human feedback, which may not have been enough yet to generate a ChatGPT-like product.
Another challenge along the way was how to validate. Since OpenAI never showed how it trained with its algorithm, Baidu’s teams had to experiment on their own in order to develop a specific language model.
When will Ernie Bot be released?
Li promised that some users will soon be able to test Ernie for themselves, but did not say when that will happen. In the initial phase, the robot will be exclusive to partner companies, as a way to analyze practical uses in the market.
This was the first launch of an AI solution by a Chinese Big Tech. There were high expectations for this, after all Baidu is one of the largest companies in the East, with ambitious plans to integrate Ernie into the search engine and other products.
Ernie’s release comes amid a series of problems presented by natural conversational AIs. OpenAI has accused its ChatGPT of absurd errors and even of playing negative content. OR Google Bard crashed upon launch presenting incorrect space information. And the Microsoft had several snags with Bing Chat, although the latter was recently released widely.
With the arrival of GPT-4 technology to the market, Baidu will have an even bigger challenge to surpass the service. OpenAI knows that competitors are hot on their heels, so it has released even fewer details about how AI works technically.
Have the Chinese managed to have a solution worthy of ChatGPT? The market appears to be miserable, but that will only be answered when the Ernie Bot takes over the world.
Source: Financial Times
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Source: Terra
Rose James is a Gossipify movie and series reviewer known for her in-depth analysis and unique perspective on the latest releases. With a background in film studies, she provides engaging and informative reviews, and keeps readers up to date with industry trends and emerging talents.
