China's Answer to ChatGPT Flubs Its First Lines

When rumors began swirling last month about the Chinese search giant Baidu working on a chatbot to rival OpenAI's ChatGPT, it seemed like the perfect move. Baidu has invested heavily in artificial intelligence over the past decade and could harness the technology for its leading search engine, as Microsoft has done for Bing and Google says it will do too. Yet when Baidu unveiled Ernie Bot, or 文心一言 "Wenxin Yiyan" in Chinese, in Beijing earlier this month, the news fell flat. Robin Li, Baidu's CEO, admitted halfway through the launch stream that demos of Ernie Bot answering general knowledge questions, summarizing information from the web, and generating images were prerecorded, leading to snarky commentary on Chinese social media. It didn't help that OpenAI had introduced a major upgrade, called GPT-4, to the AI technology that powers ChatGPT only the day before.