Baidu unveils China’s answer to ChatGPT with no live preview and limited beta, dashing hopes and sending stock tumbling

[F-22Raptor]

Chinese internet search giant Baidu has released to select users a beta version of Ernie Bot, its much-anticipated answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but skipped a live demonstration that is typically the linchpin of technology launches from Silicon Valley to Barcelona, a letdown that sent its stock sliding in Hong Kong amid a declining market.


Company founder and CEO Robin Li Yanhong spoke on stage for about 30 minutes during the event in Beijing on Thursday afternoon, which was also broadcast live online. Instead of demonstrating the tech himself, Li’s talk was accompanied by PowerPoint slides showing what the bot is capable of, including writing company slogans, solving math problems, and even generating audio and video. Recordings of Ernie Bot at work were also shown.


Baidu shares were down by as much as 10 per cent during Li’s presentation. Shares closed down 6.4 per cent for the day to HK$125.1 (US$15.94). This was in sharp contrast with last month, when the stock gained 15 per cent on the news that Baidu was working on a ChatGPT challenger, fanning hopes that one of China’s leading AI firms could unlock the potential of large language models in the country.


The event comes one day after OpenAI generated more excitement over its own AI tech by launching GPT-4, the latest and most advanced version of the start-up’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) language models.

‘Brave and regretful’ start as Baidu unveils China’s ChatGPT challenger

Baidu founder Robin Li spoke for 30 minutes, relying on slides and pre-recorded video to unveil Ernie Bot’s capabilities, which failed to impress investors.

amp.scmp.com

 

[F-22Raptor]

China’s Answer to ChatGPT Gets an Artificial Debut and Disappoints​

Almost six years ago, a Google computer program toppled the best player in China — and the world — at Go, an ancient Chinese board game. The defeat catalyzed China’s revolution in artificial intelligence. Beijing unrolled a monumental A.I. plan, and investors poured record sums into new projects.

Now, a similar moment has arrived: The rise of ChatGPT has kicked off another A.I. arms race, this time in the realm of machine-generated content. On Thursday, China’s first major rival to ChatGPT was unveiled in Beijing by the search giant Baidu. But the debut of the bot, dubbed Ernie, was a flop.

Halfway through a demonstration that had been marketed as live, in which Ernie summarized a science fiction novel and analyzed a Chinese idiom, Robin Li, Baidu’s chief executive, said the presentation had been prerecorded “to save time.”

Baidu’s shares plunged 10 percent in Hong Kong, a striking contrast to the rally earlier this year that was fueled by the company’s announcement that it has had a rival to ChatGPT in the works since 2019.

The botched rollout comes as the likes of Baidu and Google rush to catch up with ChatGPT, whose maker released a new version this week. It was also a sign that China still has work to do to catch up with the United States in A.I., a race that has only intensified in recent years as relations between the two countries have deteriorated. As Washington has moved to contain competition from China, it has cut Beijing off from high-end computing chips — a key ingredient in technologies like ChatGPT and Ernie.

Because of enormous computing requirements, only a handful of companies, most based in either the United States or China, have the capacity to build bots that rely on what are known as large language models. Microsoft has poured billions of dollars into OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

Baidu’s bot, whose name comes from Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, will be open to some users starting Thursday.

Ernie, Mr. Li insisted, was not a “tool for Sino-U.S. technology competition.” But he also acknowledged that ChatGPT’s success had accelerated the timeline for Baidu’s rollout.

But even before Ernie’s underwhelming debut, many Chinese wondered why, despite billions of dollars invested by their government and venture capitalists, the nation had not rebounded from its humbling in 2017, when Google’s AlphaGo program beat Jie Ke, the Go champion.

“China is incredibly good at scaling an existing invention, but it is not very good at making breakthroughs,” said Huang Yasheng, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of a forthcoming book on Chinese innovation. The country, he argued, lacks the diversity of thought and free expression of ideas that help nurture out-of-the-box thinking.

Last month, Chinese authorities suspended ChatYuan, one of the earliest chatbots in China, for providing, among other things, answers that challenged the Communist Party’s official stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Xu Chenggang, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, had a harsher assessment of Beijing’s efforts to build a better bot.

China’s chatbots “cannot approach the level of ChatGPT,” Mr. Xu said, because China’s strict censorship rules could undermine the quality of data and hamstring the development of chatbots.

“If there are restrictions everywhere in the setup of your algorithms, of course its ability will be restricted,” he said.

Chinese officials have also worked to temper expectations. Earlier this month, Wang Zhigang, China’s minister of science and technology, used a soccer analogy to convey the work still left to do to compete with ChatGPT.

“Playing football involves dribbling and shooting, but it’s not easy to be as good as Messi,” he said, referring to the superstar footballer Lionel Messi. “Our country has also made a lot of arrangements and conducted research in this field for many years and has achieved some results. However, it may still take some time to achieve the same level of performance as OpenAI,” he added.

China’s Answer to ChatGPT Gets an Artificial Debut and Disappoints

The promised “live” demonstration of the bot had, in fact, been recorded. Shares of Baidu, the company behind the technology, tumbled in Hong Kong.

www.nytimes.com

 

[PeterboroughAli]

Chinese internet search giant Baidu has released to select users a beta version of Ernie Bot, its much-anticipated answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but skipped a live demonstration that is typically the linchpin of technology launches from Silicon Valley to Barcelona, a letdown that sent its stock sliding in Hong Kong amid a declining market.


Company founder and CEO Robin Li Yanhong spoke on stage for about 30 minutes during the event in Beijing on Thursday afternoon, which was also broadcast live online. Instead of demonstrating the tech himself, Li’s talk was accompanied by PowerPoint slides showing what the bot is capable of, including writing company slogans, solving math problems, and even generating audio and video. Recordings of Ernie Bot at work were also shown.


Baidu shares were down by as much as 10 per cent during Li’s presentation. Shares closed down 6.4 per cent for the day to HK$125.1 (US$15.94). This was in sharp contrast with last month, when the stock gained 15 per cent on the news that Baidu was working on a ChatGPT challenger, fanning hopes that one of China’s leading AI firms could unlock the potential of large language models in the country.


The event comes one day after OpenAI generated more excitement over its own AI tech by launching GPT-4, the latest and most advanced version of the start-up’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) language models.

‘Brave and regretful’ start as Baidu unveils China’s ChatGPT challenger

Baidu founder Robin Li spoke for 30 minutes, relying on slides and pre-recorded video to unveil Ernie Bot’s capabilities, which failed to impress investors.

amp.scmp.com

It’s a shame competition is good for society at times

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

Baidu ERNIE Bot Press Conference​

 

[Menthol]

China’s Answer to ChatGPT Gets an Artificial Debut and Disappoints​

Almost six years ago, a Google computer program toppled the best player in China — and the world — at Go, an ancient Chinese board game. The defeat catalyzed China’s revolution in artificial intelligence. Beijing unrolled a monumental A.I. plan, and investors poured record sums into new projects.

Now, a similar moment has arrived: The rise of ChatGPT has kicked off another A.I. arms race, this time in the realm of machine-generated content. On Thursday, China’s first major rival to ChatGPT was unveiled in Beijing by the search giant Baidu. But the debut of the bot, dubbed Ernie, was a flop.

Halfway through a demonstration that had been marketed as live, in which Ernie summarized a science fiction novel and analyzed a Chinese idiom, Robin Li, Baidu’s chief executive, said the presentation had been prerecorded “to save time.”

Baidu’s shares plunged 10 percent in Hong Kong, a striking contrast to the rally earlier this year that was fueled by the company’s announcement that it has had a rival to ChatGPT in the works since 2019.

The botched rollout comes as the likes of Baidu and Google rush to catch up with ChatGPT, whose maker released a new version this week. It was also a sign that China still has work to do to catch up with the United States in A.I., a race that has only intensified in recent years as relations between the two countries have deteriorated. As Washington has moved to contain competition from China, it has cut Beijing off from high-end computing chips — a key ingredient in technologies like ChatGPT and Ernie.

Because of enormous computing requirements, only a handful of companies, most based in either the United States or China, have the capacity to build bots that rely on what are known as large language models. Microsoft has poured billions of dollars into OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

Baidu’s bot, whose name comes from Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, will be open to some users starting Thursday.

Ernie, Mr. Li insisted, was not a “tool for Sino-U.S. technology competition.” But he also acknowledged that ChatGPT’s success had accelerated the timeline for Baidu’s rollout.

But even before Ernie’s underwhelming debut, many Chinese wondered why, despite billions of dollars invested by their government and venture capitalists, the nation had not rebounded from its humbling in 2017, when Google’s AlphaGo program beat Jie Ke, the Go champion.

“China is incredibly good at scaling an existing invention, but it is not very good at making breakthroughs,” said Huang Yasheng, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the author of a forthcoming book on Chinese innovation. The country, he argued, lacks the diversity of thought and free expression of ideas that help nurture out-of-the-box thinking.

Last month, Chinese authorities suspended ChatYuan, one of the earliest chatbots in China, for providing, among other things, answers that challenged the Communist Party’s official stance on Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Xu Chenggang, a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, had a harsher assessment of Beijing’s efforts to build a better bot.

China’s chatbots “cannot approach the level of ChatGPT,” Mr. Xu said, because China’s strict censorship rules could undermine the quality of data and hamstring the development of chatbots.

“If there are restrictions everywhere in the setup of your algorithms, of course its ability will be restricted,” he said.

Chinese officials have also worked to temper expectations. Earlier this month, Wang Zhigang, China’s minister of science and technology, used a soccer analogy to convey the work still left to do to compete with ChatGPT.

“Playing football involves dribbling and shooting, but it’s not easy to be as good as Messi,” he said, referring to the superstar footballer Lionel Messi. “Our country has also made a lot of arrangements and conducted research in this field for many years and has achieved some results. However, it may still take some time to achieve the same level of performance as OpenAI,” he added.

China’s Answer to ChatGPT Gets an Artificial Debut and Disappoints

The promised “live” demonstration of the bot had, in fact, been recorded. Shares of Baidu, the company behind the technology, tumbled in Hong Kong.

www.nytimes.com

The article is full of political BS.

It says that ChatGPT is not being censored.

Political correctness (aka censorship) is what makes ChatGPT less powerful than during its debut.

 

[StraightEdge]

Baidu shares fall after disappointing AI chatbot debut (moneycontrol.com)
Baidu Soars After Analysts Test ChatGPT Rival Ernie Bot, Giving Approval - Bloomberg
Microsoft Stock Falling as Bing AI Descends Into Madness (futurism.com)

This is a bad trend, too much speculation based on a technology which is yet to monetized properly.

 

[Hamartia Antidote]

The article is full of political BS.

It says that ChatGPT is not being censored.

Political correctness (aka censorship) is what makes ChatGPT less powerful than during its debut.

It's just being an equal-opportunity non-offender with the political correctness.

If it didn't it would be banned by countries for slandering people/things like public officials or governments.

Now all that defensiveness means you can't even say anything bad about an ant.

 

[That Guy]

The article is full of political BS.

It says that ChatGPT is not being censored.

Political correctness (aka censorship) is what makes ChatGPT less powerful than during its debut.

Not political correctness, but rather legal issue. If the bot is capable of writing, say erotica, they'd run into a number of regulatory issues. They're also trying to program ethics into the bot to combat trolls, who'll try to get the bot to repeat nazi shit.

 

[casual]

Not political correctness, but rather legal issue. If the bot is capable of writing, say erotica, they'd run into a number of regulatory issues. They're also trying to program ethics into the bot to combat trolls, who'll try to get the bot to repeat nazi shit.

This. The underlying technology has been around for decades but it's hard to have your bot trained on the internet to not become extremely toxic. ChatGPT has made some significant innovations in this area. But even then there's currently still issues in this regard that forced OpenAI to limit queries. Either way, I believed the future of the technology lies in private local instances as opposed to public chatbots like ChatGPT. Companies just don't feel comfortable feeding their private data to Microsoft via ChatGPT.

 

[hirobo2]

This. The underlying technology has been around for decades but it's hard to have your bot trained on the internet to not become extremely toxic. ChatGPT has made some significant innovations in this area. But even then there's currently still issues in this regard that forced OpenAI to limit queries. Either way, I believed the future of the technology lies in private local instances as opposed to public chatbots like ChatGPT. Companies just don't feel comfortable feeding their private data to Microsoft via ChatGPT.

Maybe even longer. When I was in grade 7, I saw this kid play with an auto-bot chat program on the school computer that was NOT connected to the internet. He would type in "how are you?" and the chat bot would respond with something looking like a human typed it. Totally blew my mind!

ChatGPT just an assembler of a large library of documents. Betcha when u examine the source code, it will look less sophisticated than the auto suggestions generated by Tiktok.