The company Baidu, one of the largest technology companies in China, presented weeks ago its proposal to compete against ChatGPT: Ernie Bot. Such was its success that only two days after the announcement, more than 600,000 people signed up to try Ernie Bot from the moment it was launched.
For the time being, Baidu has shared pre-recorded videos of Ernie Bot, where we can see its abilities in action. The chatbot is capable of producing financial reports, creating PowerPoint presentations, generating travel itineraries and even generating human-like streamers.
However, Baidu unexpectedly canceled Ernie Bot’s live presentation, according to Reuters. The broadcast, which was scheduled for yesterday afternoon, will finally be a meeting where the companies that tested the chatbot for the first time will be present.
According to the company, the change was due to high demand, as more than 120,000 companies requested to test Ernie Bot. The chatbot was introduced by Baidu CEO Robin Li on March 16 and is capable of generating images from written descriptions and producing audio in Chinese dialects, among other things. As reported by Reuters, initial tests show that despite its good performance in Chinese, it still makes factual errors and does not answer political questions.
The change in the format of the public presentation caused a drop in Baidu shares (down 4.5% on Monday morning). Despite the cancellation of the live presentation, more companies will be able to sign up to test Ernie Bot starting March 31.
Baidu has proven to be one of the leading companies in the field of artificial intelligence. Ernie Bot is yet another example of how the company is using this technology to innovate in an industry dominated by names such as Google and Microsoft.
