Baidu’s Ernie Bot Not Well Received. Stock Price Plunges Nearly 10%

According to Taiwan media reports, Baidu’s version of ChatGPT, “Ernie Bot,” which claims to be powerful, officially debuted on March 16. However, investors were not optimistic about Baidu’s new product and functional demonstrations, and the stock price plummeted accordingly. From the demonstrations the Ernie Bot is a large-scale language model similar to ChatGPT, focusing on scenarios such as literary creation, commercial copywriting, mathematical logic calculation, Chinese understanding, and multi-modal generation. Baidu CEO Li Yanhong claimed that Ernie Bot is the world’s first product corresponding to the competitor ChatGPT and even GPT-4. However, at the press conference that day, Li Yanhong (李彦宏)and his team did not perform live demonstrations of the Ernie Bot’s AI function. Some investors noted that “The demo looks like pre-recorded, and it’s just a briefing so far. These demonstrations don’t look spontaneous.” Li did not quote any content from their database or introduce an in-depth AI model and did not propose a comparison between Ernie Bot and ChatGPT.

Investors were not optimistic about Ernie Bot. After the press conference, Baidu’s stock price fell by nearly 10%, and its market value evaporated by more than 31.4 billion Hong Kong dollars.