Baidu Launches Its Answer To ChatGPT, But Shares Take A Tumble

Billionaire Robin Li launches on March 16 Baidu's conversational chatbot, Ernie Bot, at the company's headquarters in Beijing. Billionaire and Baidu CEO Robin Li on Thursday officially unveiled the Chinese search giant's answer to ChatGPT, as his company seeks to outdo domestic competitors in developing conversational artificial intelligence technologies, which have recently taken the world's second largest economy by storm. At a highly anticipated event at Baidu's Beijing headquarters, the 54-year-old Li walked onto the stage and displayed the company's chatbot service, Ernie Bot. But instead of a live demo, the audience was only shown videos of Ernie Bot performing a range of prepared and pre-recorded tasks, including answering questions about a popular novelist, composing press releases as well as working on mathematics problems. So attendees weren't given a chance to interact with Ernie Bot in real-time, though the company said the service will be available to a selected group of users starting on Thursday.