The Chinese tech giant continues to miss its promises, promising to launch a rival of ChatGPT but cancels it at the last minute.

Since mid-March, in an effort to keep up with the ChatGPT craze that is spreading globally, Chinese search giant Baidu has introduced its own AI chatbot called Ernie Bot. The event seemed to be held in a hurry when instead of launching new technology, Baidu just published a video introducing this AI chatbot.

The reason for this rush, as explained by Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, is that high demand from users has prompted the company to launch this chatbot earlier than expected. But the company promises to hold a press release to officially launch this AI technology near the end of March.

But in the end, the event was canceled at the last minute when Baidu said the press release was replaced with “a private meeting” for potential business customers “to help customers use better than Ernie Bot cloud services”.

Again, according to Baidu’s statement, the reason for this change was “excessive demand” from 120,000 firms waiting to test the company’s Ernie Bot. Also during Monday’s event, Baidu said it had opened the world’s first “big AI modeling platform” for businesses – powered by Ernie Bot. Following the announcement of the company’s closed-door meeting, the share price showed investor disappointment as it plummeted 4.5% on the exchange.

Currently, Baidu is the first major Chinese technology company to launch a ChatGPT-like service in this country when it introduced a clip of Ernie Bot in mid-March. So far, the company has only allowed a group of individual customers to try the AI ​​chatbot.

Other Baidu colleagues, including Alibaba Group and Tencent Holdings, say they are also developing technologies similar to ChatGPT, but have yet to launch their products to the public.

Even so, the introduction of Ernie Bot disappointed Baidu investors, as the chatbot did not demonstrate its technology directly. Even after the chatbot launch in mid-March, Baidu’s stock dropped by as much as 10% before rebounding the next day.

Last week, Ernie Bot became the subject of ridicule on the Chinese internet when some users discovered that the chatbot would draw a turkey, a bird when the user asked about it. Turkey (also called Turkey), although the Chinese characters of the two words are completely different.

Baidu argues that its chatbot is still “self-evolving” and that even GPT-4 – OpenAI’s latest AI model – cannot generate an image from scratch. Some other users also admitted that Ernie Bot translates from Chinese to English better than ChatGPT.

However, a recent test by the South China Morning Post showed that Ernie Bot often avoided sensitive questions on political topics. Many experts also say that information censorship could pose a challenge for Chinese companies racing to build ChatGPT rivals.