Determined to compete with OpenAi and ChatGPT, Baidu presented “Ernie Bot”. But with an unconvincing presentation, the Chinese company immediately fell on the stock market.
Not everyone can become a direct competitor to ChatGPT overnight. This is undoubtedly what Baidu retained after the presentation of “Ernie Bot”, which is intended to be a chatbot in line with that offered by OpenAI.
The company, Chinese equivalent of Google, and its CEO Robin Li have indeed unveiled for more than an hour the premises of what could be the ChatGPT for the Chinese population. On the program: math calculations, generating images from text and writing poems in Mandarin.
Pre-recorded videos
But the presentation did not necessarily have the desired effect for Baidu. The company’s price immediately fell by 10% on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, representing a loss of $3 billion in market valuation. The reason: no live demo was made during the conference.
Indeed, Robin Li only delivered his monologue, accompanied by screenshots or pre-recorded videos. A presentation that therefore did not please, not to mention that no official release date has been revealed. For the moment only available by invitation or API for certain companies (30,000 have already made the request according to Baidu), thus difficult to say more about the future capacities of Ernie Bot.
Launch too rushed?
Robin Li did, however, announce the color by indicating that the chatbot was not perfect. What accentuate the concerns of investors about a too hasty launch.
“Why are we launching it today? Because the market demands it,” replies the CEO of Baidu, however.
This somewhat failed launch is also reminiscent of that of Google. A few weeks ago, the American giant introduced Bard, again a competitor to ChatGPT. But the chatbot had made a mistake by not answering an astronomy question correctly. Result: the title of Alphabet, parent company of Google, had lost 7% on the New York Stock Exchange in the hours that followed.
