China's response to ChatGPT makes artificial debut and disappoints

The promised “live” demo of the bot had, in fact, been pre-recorded. Shares of Baidu, the company behind the technology, fell in Hong Kong.

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

Now a similar moment has arrived: the rise of ChatGPT has launched another AI. arms race, this time in the realm of machine-generated content. On Thursday, ChatGPT's first major Chinese rival was unveiled in Beijing by search giant Baidu. But the debut of the bot, dubbed Ernie, was a flop.

Halfway through a demo that had been marketed live, in which Ernie summed up a novel science fiction and analyzing a Chinese idiom, Robin Li, chief executive of Baidu, said the presentation was pre-recorded "to save time".

The actions from Baidu fell 10% in Hong Kong, a stark contrast to the rally earlier this year which was fueled by the company's announcement that it had a rival to ChatGPT in the works since 2019.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">The botched rollout comes as Baidu and Google race to catch up with ChatGPT, the maker of which released a new version this week. It was also a sign that China still has some work to do to catch up with the United States in AI, a race that has only intensified in recent years as relations between the two countries grow. are deteriorated. As Washington has moved to contain competition from China, it has cut Beijing off from high-end computer chips - a key ingredient in technologies like ChatGPT and Ernie.

Due to the enormous IT requirements, only a handful of companies, mostly based in the US or China, have the ability to create bots that rely on so-called large models of language. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

Baidu's bot, named after Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, will be open to certain users from Thursday.

Ernie, Li insisted, was not a "tool for Sino-American tech competition." But he also acknowledged that ChatGPT's success had accelerated Baidu's rollout schedule.

ImageM. Li insisted that Ernie bot is not a "tool for China-US technology competition". many Chinese have wondered why, despite the billions of dollars invested by their government and venture capitalists, the nation has not rebounded from its humiliation in 2017, when Google's AlphaGo program beat Jie Ke, the Go champion.

"China is incredibly good at evolving an existing invention, but not very good at making breakthroughs," said Huang Yasheng , professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 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 original thought.

Last month , the Chinese authorities have suspended. ..