The rumors of last month were confirmed today, when the Chinese giant Baidu made official during a press conference its chat bot that will have to deal with the best known ChatGPT and Bard. The company said it has been working for years on a product that gives “human” appearance to artificial intelligence, not surprisingly the name Ernie Bot derives from Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, the linguistic model that underlies it and which dates back to 2019.
However, the introduction of Ernie Bot was not rosy for Baidu. Reuters reports that while Robin Li, the company’s CEO, unveiled the chat bot to the public, Baidu’s shares were down 10%, and at the time of writing, 5-6 hours later, they are trading at more than 6% below the value at which trading opened. Probably something disappointed investors, perhaps the pre-recorded clips shown during the conference in which Ernie Bot demonstrated that he could write a poem or answer questions about the Chinese novel The Three-Body Problem.
The CEO admitted that Ernie Bot has great room for improvement, the presentation was anticipated compared to the moment when it would have been ideal for the potential of the software due to the strong market demand, and probably to show the competition that Baidu is also in the game. The plans for the future are as ambitious as those of the best-known competitors in the West: Ernie Bot will be an integral part of Baidu’s search engine and will lend its intelligence to the most diverse areas, automotive, cloud, etc.
Robin Li said that more than 650 companies have expressed interest in Ernie Bot for an upcoming implementation, some of them private, others close to the Xi administration. Availability unknown.