China’s answer to ChatGPT? Baidu shares tumble as it unveils Ernie Bot

From: Reuters

Chinese search engine giant Baidu on Thursday unveiled its much-anticipated artificial intelligence-powered chatbot known as Ernie Bot, giving the world a glimpse of what could be China’s strongest rival to U.S. research lab OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

The popularity of ChatGPT, backed by Microsoft, has triggered a frenzied rush among Chinese tech giants and startups alike to develop a rival. Baidu jumped to the forefront of the race after saying early last month it was close to completing a chatbot using its AI-driven deep learning model, Ernie - short for “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration”.

The Ernie Bot introduction, in a presentation at Baidu headquarters in Beijing, comes two days after Alphabet Inc’s Google unveiled a flurry of AI tools for its email, collaboration and cloud software. Microsoft is expected to make a similar announcement to Google later on Thursday.

“For sure we cannot say that it’s perfect,” said Baidu CEO Robin Li, presenting Ernie Bot. “So why are we unveiling it today? Because the market demands it.”

But the limited presentation of Ernie Bot, restricted to brief, pre-recorded videos, failed to match market hopes and Baidu’s Hong Kong-listed shares in the firm tumbled as much as 10% before clawing back some ground.

During the presentation, Li showed five videos of Ernie Bot answering questions on popular Chinese science fiction novel “The Three Body Problem”, carrying out mathematical calculations, understanding Chinese dialects and generating a video and image with text prompts.

“Today’s announcement is a natural continuation of the hard work we have put in over the past many years,” he said at the event, which was also livestreamed across nine platforms, including Twitter, Youtube and Weibo.

Starting Thursday, Ernie Bot will be open to an initial group of users with invitation codes, and companies can apply to embed the bot into their products via Baidu’s cloud platform.

Baidu has touted its many years of heavy R&D investment in artificial intelligence and deep learning as one reason it is best placed to lead the race to develop a Chinese answer to ChatGPT. Baidu’s research and development expenses in 2022 were 21.4 billion yuan ($3.1 billion), accounting for 22% of revenue.

Baidu plans to use Ernie Bot to revolutionise its search engine, by far the most dominant in China, as well as use it to increase efficiency in cloud, smart cars and household appliances, among other mainstream businesses.

Earlier this week, OpenAI on Tuesday said it is beginning to release a powerful artificial intelligence model known as GPT-4, describing it as “multimodel”, meaning images as well as text prompts can spur it to generate content.

Li nodded to GPT-4 during his speech, saying that its coming showed the threshold for this sort of technology was very high, and that it surprised him with its ability to summarise information.

But he also cautioned against seeing this through the lens of geopolitics. “Ernie Bot is not a tool of confrontation between China and the United States,” he said.

To date, 650 companies have said they will join the Ernie ecosystem, he added. Chinese state media outlets and a Shaolin temple were among the first sign-ups to become Ernie Bot partners.

生词记录

share 分享，股票，股价

tumble 滚动，跌倒，下跌

unveil 揭露，揭幕，公布

Reuters 路透社

glimpse 瞥见，短暂的感受

rival 竞争对手，敌手；可与之媲美，比得上

trigger 触发器，扳机

frenzied 疯狂的，暴乱的

integration 结合，整合

flurry 一阵忙乱（关注，激动）；阵雨/雪

match market hope 符合市场预期

list 动词：上市

claw sth back 费力夺回，设法捞回

prompt 提示，促使

continuation 持续，延续

livestream 互联网直播，线上直播

tout 吹嘘，吹捧，标榜

sb’s answer to sb/sth 与…相当，…的对应物

revolutionise 在某方面引起突破性变革

dominant 首要的，占支配地位的，显著的

appliance 家电

spur 刺激，激励

threshold 界限，门槛，临界点，下限

caution 小心，谨慎；告诫，提醒

geopolitics 地缘政治

confrontation 对峙，对抗，交锋，对立

outlet 直销店，商店

media/news outlet 媒体/新闻机构

To date 迄今为止

文章概述

2023年3月16日，百度为了迎合市场需求，发布了并不完美的文心一言机器人，结果与市场预期不符，导致股价大跌。

个人感悟

自2023年开年以来，chatgpt大火，引发了一阵科技狂潮。国内的科技巨头为了搭上这班人工智能列车，纷纷宣布入局，百度就是其中之一。当初宣传时万众期待，结果发布会只是展示了几个预录的视频，并没有与文心一言进行实时互动，由此受到质疑与嘲笑是肯定的了。

不过个人认为，还是需要给予一定的耐心，毕竟训练和发展还需要一定时间，想霎时间就达到老美发布的GPT4水平是不可能的，至少现在还是勉强坐上了这趟AI列车，不至于落后太多。

英语提升