At first, investors were not quite impressed with the Ernie bot when it was first revealed to the public. But after the initial drop of stock value, it strongly rebounded the very next day.
Baidu office – illustrative photo. Image credit: Daniel Cukier via Flickr, CC BY-ND 2.0
Compared to yesterday’s drop after the unimpressive launch of the new AI platform, shares of Chinese giant Baidu grew by 15.7% on Friday, March 17, 2023.
At first, many observers criticized Baidu’s decision to skip the live demonstration while also heavily judging its alleged inferiority in comparison to ChatGPT.
However, everything turned around quite quickly – in one day, in fact, thanks to the input from the users who were invited to test the Ernie bot hands-on.
Multiple posts and live-streamed tests appeared where the Chinese chatbot was compared side-by-side to the main competitors, Google Bard and Microsoft Bing, which is based on the ChatGPT algorithm.
It would seem according to these comparisons that Ernie falls a bit behind the main competitors, but the difference is not large. “There is a definite gap between Ernie bot and Bing, but it is not insanely big, in certain questions (Ernie) even performed better than Bing,” said one of the bloggers on Weibo.
Market experts also comment that the initial disappointment was offset to the positive side after everyone realized that this new artificial intelligence algorithm will eventually become one of the strongest contenders in the market, especially when we are talking about the integration of AI into leading search engines.
Currently, more than 75,000 corporate users already submitted their applications to test Ernie API in Baidu Cloud.
