Baidu officially launches Ernie Bot, its answer to Chat-GPT

This is what the Chinese business press is buzzing about today:

Baidu today officially launched its own ChatGPT-like conversational AI bot, Ernie Bot. At an event in Beijing, founder and CEO Robin Li (李彦宏 Lǐ Yànhóng) and CTO Wáng Hǎifēng 王海锋 showed off some of the new platform’s features and explained that a first batch of beta users would be able to test the chatbot and enterprises would eventually be able to use a related API. At the event, Ernie Bot showed off its skills by writing a press release, proposing a few literary ideas, and solving some math problems.

Baidu’s answer to the U.S.-based OpenAi’s Chat-GPT model has been highly anticipated, and the Wall Street Journal previously reported that hundreds of employees had been working around the clock on the project. It also cited unnamed inside sources that said they were unsure if the project would be successful, and had opted to sell some of their own Baidu shares.

One of the big questions about Chinese clones of ChatGPT is how they will deal with censorship. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out today: China’s AI chatbots clam up when asked about Xí Jìnpíng’s 习近平 leadership.

Chinese logistics company ZTO Express released excellent results for 2022: The company’s revenue reached 35.4 billion yuan ($5.1 billion), a year-on year increase of 16.3%, and adjusted net profits were 6.8 billion yuan ($986.2 million), an increase of 37.6%. ZTO Express hit parcel volume of 24.4 billion pieces, an increase of 9.4%, the top growth rate in the industry, and as a result saw its market share expand by 1.5 percentage points to 22.1%.

ZTO express has seen some controversy of late after prominent short seller Grizzly Research published a report earlier this month claiming the NYSE-listed company’s financials were faked.

China‘s delivery and logistics industry is highly competitive, and has been beset by price wars in the past. Its development and expansion is also key to China’s massive, world-leading ecommerce market. Improvements to logistics will allow for more types of products, especially perishable ones, to reach more consumers across the country, and will inevitably play a role in boosting domestic consumption demand, a key policy goal in Beijing.

China’s state broadcaster CCTV yesterday held its annual “3.15 Gala,” where it names and shames companies for harming consumers’ interests. The program spans various industries, and included free “cracked” versions of apps (破解版App) that violate user data privacy, below-standard pipes in rural Jiangsu Province with steel rebar exposed, and shoddy motorbike helmets produced in Guangdong Province that break easily and cause rather than prevent injury.

Food and medicine safety was a major theme of the program. Bubble tea shops came under scrutiny for poor hygienic practices that caused consumers to become infected with bacteria, and livestreamers hawking dubious medicinal products, often to elderly viewers, were also exposed.