By Eduardo Baptista and Josh Ye for Reuters
the chinese company Baidu on Thursday unveiled its long-awaited AI-based chatbot, known as Ernie Botbut disappointed investors over its use of pre-recorded videos and the lack of a public release, sending its shares tumbling.
The presentation, which lasted just over an hour, took place two days after Google, from Alphabet Incunveiled a barrage of AI tools for its email, collaboration and cloud software, and gave the world a glimpse of what could be China’s strongest rival to the ChatGPT from the American research laboratory OpenAI.
However, unlike ChatGPTwhich launched to the public in November as a free-to-use chatbot, Baidu limited the presentation to short videos showing Ernie performing math calculations, speaking in Chinese dialects, and generating a video and image with text prompts.
As of Thursday, only an initial group of users with invitation codes will be able to test it, while companies will be able to request the incorporation of the bot into their products through the cloud platform of Baiduas reported by the company.
Ba’s actionswidu in Hong Kong they plummeted as much as 10% during the intervention of its executive president, Robin Li, and closed with a collapse of 6.4%, which meant a cut of more than 3,000 million dollars in the market valuation of the giant Chinese search engines.
“It seems like the presentation was more of a monologue and script than the interactive session people were looking for. There was also no soft release date, which probably led to some negative sentiment”said Kai Wang, an analyst at Morningstar.
Baidu is leading the race between tech giants and startups in China to develop a rival to Microsoft’s ChatGPT, which caused a worldwide sensation after showing off the power of so-called generative artificial intelligence, capable of creating new text, images and other content. from previous data.
During the presentation at Baidu’s headquarters in Beijing, which was also broadcast live on nine platforms, Li warned that it was not perfect. “Why are we presenting it today? Because the market demands it,” he said.
Source: Ambito
