Ernie Bot vs. ChatGPT: Baidu’s New AI Chatbot Fails to Impress. Last week, Baidu, a Chinese tech company, launched its first Chinese rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT called Ernie Bot. The launch event was highly anticipated in the tech world in China, but the chatbot’s performance was met with a wave of disappointment. However, since the launch, Ernie Bot’s reputation seems to have bounced back, and Baidu’s stock price rebounded by 15.7% on Friday.
Ernie Bot performs very much like ChatGPT, with a basic command of historical facts, works of literature, and internet trends but sometimes gets the details wrong. It also has image-making capabilities, unlike ChatGPT. However, Ernie Bot fails in many of the same areas where ChatGPT failed, such as making up facts and making errors in grade school math. Ernie Bot performs marginally worse than ChatGPT, making more mistakes and understanding less about complex questions.
The release of Ernie Bot confirms that Chinese companies are still trailing behind their American peers by quite a distance in the field of artificial intelligence. Chinese AI companies and researchers still have a lot to catch up on, even as they become increasingly important in this space.
Baidu’s CEO, Robin Li, tried to downplay the theme of an AI arms race between the US and China at the end of the presentation. However, in the current geopolitical climate, people on both sides will continue to use the Ernie Bot vs. GPT comparison as a proxy for the tech gap between China and the US.
Although Baidu’s domestic competitors, like Alibaba and Tencent, have confirmed that they are working on similar products, there is no indication that they are close. Enterprise products may come sooner than consumer-facing ones.
Baidu will hold another press conference on Monday, where it is expected to explain more about how other companies can adapt Ernie Bot for their businesses. However, people will undoubtedly compare it with how GPT-4 is being used by Microsoft, Duolingo, or Morgan Stanley.
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