Baidu launches ChatGPT service but no one likes it

For the past few months, Chinese tech company Baidu has been hyping up its rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the online AI-powered chatbot whose human-like responses have fascinated the internet, and made many “white collar professionals” and “knowledge workers” fear for their futures.

But today, the highly anticipated launch of Baidu’s Ernie Bot (Wénxīn Yīyán 文心一言) fell flat.

Millions of people who tuned in to watch Baidu’s demonstration were left disappointed. Shares of Baidu fell as much as 10% today, shortly after the company’s CEO and co-founder Robin Li (李彦宏 Lǐ Yànhóng) showed off Ernie Bot in short pre recorded videos, instead of a live demonstration. This was due to “time constraints,” according to Li.

The demo clips, which showed Ernie Bot carrying out mathematical calculations, speaking in Chinese dialects, and writing out business and literature skills, also seemed to pale in comparison to OpenAI’s new-and-improved model, GPT-4, that was unveiled just two days prior.

At the press event, Li admitted that the bot wasn’t perfect, but “huge market demand” pushed up its release. Chinese companies are racing alongside domestic competitors Tencent and Alibaba, as well as overseas rivals like Google, to develop a competitor to OpenAI’s groundbreaking product. “Everyone is waiting for this technology,” Li added.

The chatbot flops

“The disappointment following the release of Baidu’s AI chatbot was perhaps already written in the premises that underpinned the launch,” Ilaria Carrozza, senior researcher at the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), told The China Project today. “Baidu had not expected the release of ChatGPT by OpenAI last year and the surprise sent them on a race to catch up quickly.”

Ernie Bot is built off of Baidu’s large learning model (LLMs), Ernie — short for “Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration” — that was released in 2019. Baidu plans to integrate Ernie Bot in its search engine and across all of its operations, and will be available to invited users from today on. (In 2018, researchers at Google released BERT, Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, “a family of masked-language models.”)

“In a matter of only a few months, they were hoping to fine-tune the model, something that has taken OpenAI much longer to do. So, in this sense it is not surprising that users were not impressed by the chatbot’s skills,” Carrozza added.

Not enough high quality texts in Chinese

But unlike English-language ChatGPT, Chinese LLMs like Ernie Bot are meant to target the Chinese-language market. So while Baidu’s version is framed as China’s first public challenge to ChatGPT, Ernie Bot will also be trained mostly on Chinese materials and will not be a direct competitor to ChatGPT or other U.S. firms’ products.

“There are simply fewer high quality texts out there to train from,” Jeff Ding, an assistant professor at George Washington University and founder of the ChinAI substack, told The China Project in February. “This is something Chinese researchers working in the field have mentioned, and is also what differentiates Chinese labs from their Western counterparts.”

“If you think of the really high quality academic literature out there, a lot of that is written in English,” Ding added.

Censorship and chip curbs loom over China’s AI industry

The flopped launch of Baidu’s chatbot underscores the hurdles that many Chinese AI companies face. Rising geopolitical tensions with the U.S. and Beijing’s strict censorship rules have raised concerns that they may limit the ability for Chinese chatbots to compete with global rivals.

U.S.-led efforts to curb on advanced semiconductor equipment to China have severely restricted Chinese companies’ access to key hardware, which are used to power the supercomputers and large data centers needed to train AI-powered chatbots like Ernie Bot or ChatGPT.

“Chinese tech companies have greatly struggled over the past two years following the government’s regulatory crackdown,” Carrozza told The China Project. “And they have also been under the pressure of U.S. export controls, soon to be followed by other countries such as Japan and the Netherlands. This picture does not exactly make for an environment conducive to creativity and breakthroughs.”

Meanwhile, Chinese chatbots prior to Ernie Bot won’t badmouth Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 or approach any politically sensitive topics. Beijing said in the recently concluded “Two Sessions” that it will prioritize the development of strategic industries — including AI — to boost its self-sufficiency. But some are concerned that Chinese bots will be limited by the same strict government censorship as China’s internet.

“After what emerged from the Two Sessions, it is even clearer how science and technology have become central in Beijing’s national agenda as the government pursues a strategy of technological self-reliance…It will be hard for Chinese tech companies to square the circle and innovate whilst at the same trying to please, or at least not upset, the government,” Carrozza told The China Project.

But China has the decision-making power of an authoritarian government and a treasure trove of data to nurture LLMs and the bots that use them. These factors play a key role in creating a fertile environment for Chinese AI companies to catch up — should Beijing allow it.

“On the other hand, a closed-loop system such as that found in China — where the government, the private sector, and academia closely cooperate — can be an advantage, as all resources are catalyzed to achieve the same goal (one set by the CCP). The vast amount of data they can rely on is also advantageous in this sense,” Carrozza added.