China’s largest search company Baidu’s ‘Honnybot’, released as a competitor to US chat GPT, fell short of market expectations and pulled down its stock price.
According to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) on the 17th, Baidu Hong Kong’s share price dropped 10% immediately after Baidu founder and CEO Li Yanhong unveiled Erniebot in Beijing, China the previous afternoon. In the end, Baidu shares closed the day down 6.5%.
SCMP pointed out, “This is the opposite of the 15% increase in stock prices last month on the news that Baidu is investigating a chat GPT counter.” As Baidu is China’s leading artificial intelligence (AI) company, expectations were formed in the market at the time that it would showcase China’s potential giant language model.
However, the market evaluation is that Baidu’s demonstration of Ernibot the previous day rather highlights the technical limitations. Li Yanhong gave a presentation on stage for about 30 minutes. Instead of showing Erniebot in real time, only PowerPoint slides and pre-recorded presentation materials were released.
“Baidu is the first Chinese technology company to unveil its massive language model since ChatGPT and GPT-4, but only a recorded demonstration showed that it was not as surprising as the live demonstration,” said Liz, director of a Beijing consulting firm Analysis.
Lee also pointed to the fact that Erniebot is weak in English, unlike ChatGPT, as a limitation. “Eonnibot is good at processing Chinese, but not so good at processing English,” he said.
Yu Ying-bo, CIO of United Fortune Fund Management in Shenzhen, China, also said, “What’s different from a normal PowerPoint presentation? without even mentioning it. The presentation was very vague and hypothetical.”
Baidu is not the first company to release a chatbot as a pre-recorded video. Google used pre-recorded video when it unveiled its interactive chatbot ‘Bard’ last month, and Microsoft released ‘Bing’ in the same way. Specifically, in a demonstration video released by Google, Bard gave an incorrect answer, and the stock of Google’s parent company Alphabet plunged by more than 7% on the same day. It was later revealed that Bing also malfunctioned during the demonstration.
Li Yanhong said, “Based on my personal experience with Erniebot, I can’t say it’s perfect.” At the same time, he emphasized, “Hernybot is not an instrument of competition between China and the United States, but a natural result of Baidu engineers who dream of using technology to change the world.”
In response to the point that Erniebot is weak in English and other languages, Baidu said, “Enibot has the most advanced natural language processing function in Chinese. This development is reflected not only in understanding Chinese but also in understanding Chinese culture. Because of this, it will be more suitable for the Chinese language and the Chinese market than foreign models.”
