Baidu unveils ERNIE Bot

Baidu unveiled ERNIE Bot, its answer to ChatGPT, at an invite-only event in Beijing where founder Robin Li narrated a chat session on screen rather than typing and running queries live. Baidu said the model was strong across five areas — literary creation, business writing, mathematical calculation, Chinese-language understanding and multi-modal generation — and claimed it could “comprehend human intentions and deliver accurate, logical, and fluent responses approaching human level.” Access launched by invitation code, with the API opened to enterprise customers through Baidu AI Cloud; the company said more than 30,000 businesses applied for access within two hours of the event.

The demonstration’s pre-recorded format overshadowed the capability claims. Li acknowledged partway through that what was on screen was output prepared in advance rather than the model responding live, and investors reacted immediately: Baidu’s Hong Kong-listed shares fell as much as 10% during the session, closing the day down 6.4% and erasing roughly $3 billion of market value, on scepticism that a company confident in a genuinely live product would not have needed to fall back on canned answers. Shares partly recovered the following day as the enterprise sign-up numbers circulated.

The launch landed in the same week as GPT-4’s release, inviting direct comparison at a moment when Baidu was trying to establish itself as China’s leading answer to OpenAI, and the stumble became a widely cited cautionary example of the gap that could open between an AI product’s marketing and a live demonstration of it working.