The highly anticipated Ernie Bot chatbot was revealed by Baidu (9888.HK) on Thursday. According to the CEO of the company, it was the result of years of hard work in artificial intelligence by the company.
At a media conference in Beijing, Robin Li stated that although the bot wasn’t flawless, it was being released now due to market demand.
As he showed how the bot could answer queries, write a poem, create a movie and an image using prompts, the company’s shares that were listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange fell 10%.
According to him, 650 businesses have so far expressed interest in joining the Ernie community. The first partners for Ernie Bot included Shaolin monasteries and state-run Chinese media sources.
Due to the success of ChatGPT, a Microsoft (MSFT.O)-funded project, Chinese tech titans and startups are scrambling to create a competitor.
After announcing early last month that it was almost done building a robot using its AI-driven deep learning model, Ernie, which stands for “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration,” Baidu shot to the top of the pack.
The company 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.