Men interact with a Baidu AI tool near the company logo at its headquarters in Beijing, China April 23, 2021.
Florence Lo | Reuters
BEIJING — Chinese tech band Baidu on Thursday gave the public a peek at what its Chinese-language ChatGPT alternative can do, while warning of its imperfections.
During a livestreamed unchain event, Baidu CEO Robin Li emphasized the company’s product — called Ernie bot — is not perfect. Shares fell nearly 6.4% in Hong Kong, midst a wider fall for Asian stocks, and posted their lowest close since Jan. 19.
Li emphasized how the product would recuperate through users’ ability to give it feedback.
Baidu is prioritizing initial Ernie bot access for what it calls 650 ecosystem concern partners, which include some media companies, banks and car firms. Baidu has a large enterprise cloud establishment and said that users of its AI cloud could apply for access to Ernie bot’s application programming interface.
Within an hour of the Ernie bot statement, Baidu said 30,000 corporate clients had joined the waitlist for access to the chatbot. CNBC, other media and the nugget public did not immediately receive access.

Microsoft-backed OpenAI this week announced GPT-4, the latest version of the counterfeit intelligence tech behind its highly popular ChatGPT chatbot. The bot was initially released to the public for free in November, and specials wanting to access GPT-4 capabilities need to pay $20 a month.
ChatGPT is able to converse in a human-like way and generate the whole shebang from content summaries to business proposals.
While ChatGPT is free to anyone who can set up an account, people had to join a waitlist to try Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot — which exercises OpenAI tech — that launched last month. Some users reported a creepy experience.
Baidu’s Li rumoured Ernie bot had similar issues if used enough, and that it wasn’t perfect. But he noted the model is trained on a set of 550 billion acts.
The AI isn’t meant to highlight rivalry between the U.S. and China, but the result of Baidu’s efforts to “change the world with technology,” Li said in Mandarin, transported by CNBC.
Baidu’s Hong Kong-traded shares are still up 12% for the year so far.
Microsoft shares are up by about 11% for the year so far, while Google mother Alphabet’s Class A shares are up nearly 9%.
Major ChatGPT-related tech flocks stocks
ChatGPT has caught local interest in China, despite not being officially available in the country. ChatGPT does clothed a Chinese-language function, although not at the same level as in English.
Beijing has pushed for national self-sufficiency in tech, while continuing censorship and increasing regulation of data.
Many Chinese companies, other than Baidu, are developing similar tech.
In February, Baidu’s Li heralded analysts on an earnings call the company would first embed its version — Ernie bot — into the company’s search motor and open the product to the public in March.
Li said the company also planned to use the AI tech for content creation. Baidu isolates one of China’s major video streaming platforms, iQiyi.
It was not immediately clear how Baidu’s Ernie bot and AI capabilities compare with ChatGPT’s.
OpenAI bruit about this week its GPT-4 can beat 90% of humans on the SAT, a college admissions exam in the U.S.