The simply over an hour-long presentation, which got here two days after Alphabet Inc’s Google unveiled a flurry of AI instruments for its electronic mail, collaboration and cloud software program, gave the world a glimpse of what might be China’s strongest rival to U.S. analysis lab OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
But in contrast to ChatGPT, which final November launched as a free to make use of chatbot to the general public, Baidu restricted the presentation to transient movies that confirmed Ernie finishing up mathematical calculations, talking in Chinese dialects and producing a video and picture with textual content prompts.
It will solely be open for trial to an preliminary group of customers with invitation codes from Thursday, whereas corporations can apply to embed the bot into their merchandise through Baidu’s cloud platform, the corporate mentioned.
Baidu’s Hong Kong shares tumbled as a lot as 10% whereas its CEO Robin Li spoke and ultimately closed 6.4% decrease, shaving over $3 billion off the Chinese search engine large’s market valuation.
“It seems like the presentation was more of a monologue and scripted rather than an interactive session that people were looking for. There was no soft launch date either which likely led to negative sentiments,” mentioned Kai Wang, an analyst from Morningstar.
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Baidu is seen as a pacesetter in a race in China amongst tech giants and startups to develop a rival to Microsoft ChatGPT, which took the world by storm after showcasing the ability of so-called generative AI, which might create new textual content, imagery and different content material primarily based on inputs from previous knowledge. The firm’s Ernie bot relies off its AI-driven deep studying mannequin, Ernie – brief for “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration”.
During the presentation at Baidu’s Beijing headquarters that was additionally livestreamed over 9 platforms, Li cautioned it was not good. “So why are we unveiling it today? Because the market demands it,” he mentioned.
Baidu didn’t instantly reply to a request for touch upon the share drop however after the presentation revealed an announcement saying that over 30,000 company customers had utilized to check the API of Ernie Bot’s business-facing version and that site visitors on Baidu’s cloud web site soared.
“After the release of ChatGPT, only Baidu has made a benchmark product among the major tech companies in the world,” it mentioned.
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Charlie Chai, an analyst with 86Research, mentioned whereas the occasion was clearly a disappointment for a lot of who had seen it as a buying and selling catalyst, he nonetheless seen Baidu as the most effective wager in China’s AI house.
“We continue to advise investors to patiently hold BIDU shares as the best ‘national champion’ play in China’s (semi-segregated) AI space,” he mentioned.
Baidu has touted its a few years of heavy R&D funding in synthetic intelligence and deep studying and mentioned it plans to make use of Ernie Bot to revolutionise its search engine in addition to use it to extend effectivity in cloud, good vehicles and family home equipment.
Earlier this week, OpenAI on Tuesday mentioned it’s starting to launch a robust synthetic intelligence mannequin often called GPT-4, describing it as “multimodel”, that means photos in addition to textual content prompts can spur it to generate content material.
Li nodded to GPT-4 throughout his speech, saying it stunned him with its capacity to summarise info, however cautioned in opposition to seeing this by means of the lens of geopolitics.
“Ernie Bot is not a tool of confrontation between China and the United States,” he mentioned.
To date, 650 corporations have mentioned they’ll be part of the Ernie ecosystem, he added.
Source: economictimes.indiatimes.com