Baidu hastily launched an incomplete chatbot, the company’s stock immediately plummeted

Baidu, the Chinese company behind the world’s second-largest search engine, has just announced its first intelligence-integrated chatbot. Dubbed Ernie Bot, the software represents an attempt to compete with the Bing search engine; Currently, Microsoft’s search engine has now integrated ChatGPT – a chatbot developed by OpenAI that is attracting the attention of the technology world.

Instead of directly launching new technology, Baidu released a video announcing the Ernie Bot. On stage, the company’s CEO, Mr. Robin Li, affirmed that the chatbot is not yet complete, but the high demand for use has prompted the Chinese technology company to launch the product earlier than expected. The hasty pitch immediately sent Baidu shares plummeting.

It is known that the name “Ernie” is partly taken from the phrase ” Enhanced Representation of Knowledge Integration “, which roughly translates to ” Enhanced Representation of General Knowledge “.

“ It has been more than a decade now Baidu has consistently invested in artificial intelligence… Ernie Bo is the result of years of efforts ,” said Mr. Li. He said the first version of this chatbot has been in development since 2019.

In the demonstration video, Ernie Bot was asked about the details that appeared in the popular Chinese science fiction novel series “The Three-Body Problem”. Also on stage, Ernie made a request to produce an image based on the “prompts” entered.

CEO Li confirmed that up to 650 companies have signed up to use Ernie Bot. Chatbots can be integrated into a multitude of technologies such as search, cloud storage, autonomous vehicles, or become part of a smart device. Chairman Li said Ernie Bot will continue to improve upon receiving feedback from users.

In February, Baidu revealed that the internal test version of the Ernie Bot was nearing completion. However, Ernie Bot is still likely to encounter problems inherent in these chatbots. Ernie Bot is trained on a dataset consisting of 550 billion invariant facts, but that does not mean that Ernie Bot is immune to mistakes .

Similar to the vast majority of other artificial intelligence software, performance and accuracy will only improve as more users interact with the system. With a huge data warehouse and many years of experience operating in the most populous country in the world, Baidu certainly has certain advantages over other technology competitors.

Recently, chatbot technology in particular and artificial intelligence in general have emerged as a potential investment object. Large technology companies have all announced their own AI projects, but they have not been able to win the trust of technology users.

Not really high accuracy, which can be exploited to produce hostile or potentially harmful information are two barriers preventing artificial intelligence from truly exploding. It will be a while before we can witness the birth of an AI that is useful in all aspects, improving the quality of life of all mankind.

Currently artificial intelligence is not yet complete, or in other words is still in beta.