BIDU: Baidu’s Share Price Drops After Announcing Competitor to ChatGPT
- Baidu has unveiled ‘Ernie bot’, its competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
- ChatGPT’s Chinese language support is not as fully-developed as its English version, which could be a boon to Baidu.
- The race for AI integration is on, as companies ramp up their efforts to make use of the technologies.
After OpenAI took the tech world by storm with its AI chatbot, ChatGPT, other companies are wanting to get in on the AI action. The most recent of which is Chinese tech-giant Baidu, who’s been having a pretty positive start to 2023 with a 16% share price gain. ChatGPT’s Chinese-language version is not as fully-developed as its English version, and Baidu is racing to develop China’s answer to the technology.
Enter: Ernie
Baidu showcased their alternative to ChatGPT, dubbed ‘Ernie bot’, at a release event yesterday after warning that the technology is still far from perfect. The bot will first be available to a group of 650 business partners, and will be able to receive feedback from users in order to improve the quality of its output. The release event initially caused Baidu's share price to drop, but then caused investor optimism and brought about a 3.8% gain on Thursday. If Ernie proves a success, it might help Baidu return to its greatness of 2021, when its share price reached an all-time high of $354 in February. That being said, the tech company has navigated recent economic uncertainty fairly well, with only an 8% dip YoY.
No time to spare
After agreeing to invest $10bn into OpenAI, Microsoft isn’t wasting any time in integrating ChatGPT into its products. The company has announced that it’s bringing ChatGPT to its Office Suite, through something called ‘Copilots’ – a tool which will allow users to generate large volumes of text, review text already written, and even listen to in to conference calls on behalf of the users. Google on the other hand is placing its bets on its own AI bot, Bard, and its integration into the Google suite of office tools. Whichever prevails as the victor, the AI race is well and truly in full gear.