China’s response to Microsoft’s ChatGPT? Shares of Baidu declined following its unveiling of Ernie Bot
Baidu, the dominant Chinese search engine, introduced Ernie Bot, a much-awaited chatbot driven by artificial intelligence, on Thursday, giving the world a look at what may be China’s biggest competitor to ChatGPT from the US research lab OpenAI.
Due to the success of Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, both established Chinese IT companies and startups are scrambling to create a competitor. After announcing early last month that it was almost done building a chatbot utilizing an AI-driven deep-learning algorithm, Ernie, which stands for “Enhanced Representation via Knowledge Integration,” Baidu shot to the top of the pack.
Two days after Alphabet Inc.’s Google debuted a flurry of AI capabilities for its email, collaboration, and cloud services, the Ernie Bot was introduced during a presentation at the Baidu headquarters in Beijing. Later on Thursday, Microsoft is anticipated to make a comparable statement to Google.
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The CEO of Baidu, Robin Li, presented Ernie Bot and remarked, “For sure, we never say that it is flawless.” Why are we revealing it today, then? as the market requires it.
Nevertheless, the brief, pre-recorded movies that made up Ernie Bot’s limited presentation fell short of market expectations, and Baidu’s Hong Kong-listed ownership stake fell quite as much as 10% before recovering some ground.
Li demonstrated five clips of Ernie Bot penning a poem, responding to queries on the well-known Chinese science fiction book “The Three-Body Problem,” and creating a video and a picture using prompts.
At the engagement, which was also streamed live across nine channels, including Twitter, Youtube, and Weibo, he remarked, “Today’s statement is a natural extension of the hard work that you have put in over the last several years.” In China, both Twitter as well as YouTube are forbidden.
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One of the reasons the business claims it is best positioned to take the lead in the race to create a Chinese alternative to ChatGPT is the many years of significant R&D investment it has made in AI technology and deep learning. In 2022, Baidu spent $3.1 billion on R&D, which was 22% of its total sales.
According to him, 650 businesses have so far expressed interest in joining the Ernie ecosystem. Early collaborators for Ernie Bot included Shaolin monasteries and state-run Chinese media agencies.
Disclaimer: Please note that this story was automatically created by the Reuters news agency. Beardy Nerd disclaims all liability for its contents.
