Chinese ChatGPT rival from search engine firm Baidu fails to impress

theguardian.com:

The Chinese search engine company Baidu’s shares have fallen by as much as 10% after it presented its ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence software, with investors unimpressed by the bot’s display of linguistic and maths skills.

The AI-powered ChatGPT, created by the San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a sensation for its ability to write essays, poems and programming code on demand within seconds, prompting widespread fears over cheating or of professions becoming obsolete.

Chinese tech companies have joined the global rush to develop rival software, with Alibaba and JD.com announcing similar projects.

But Baidu’s Ernie Bot, unveiled at a press event in Beijing on Thursday, fell short of expectations, with the company’s co-founder and chief executive, Robin Li, showing only a prerecorded demonstration of the software’s capabilities, rather than a live interaction.

The company showed audiences a video of the bot answering questions about the popular Chinese science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem and generating a plot summary. It also displayed Ernie Bot’s algebra skills and generated audio in Sichuanese and Hakka dialects of Chinese.

Baidu’s Hong Kong-listed shares plunged immediately after the software was unveiled, sliding by more than 10% at one point. They recovered slightly afterwards, down about 7% on Thursday afternoon.

The company launched Ernie Bot in a grand media conference in its Beijing headquarters that was livestreamed on YouTube and other platforms on Thursday. Ernie, which stands for “enhanced representation through knowledge integration”, is powered by a deep-learning AI model developed by Baidu that draws on the data from its search engine.

Li said the technology was still flawed but was being