Baidu’s Hong Kong shares rebound as users test ChatGPT-like Ernie bots

By Eduardo Baptista and Jason Juer

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Hong Kong-listed shares in China’s Baidu rebounded 15.7% on Friday as users reported their experience with Ernie Bot, offsetting losses from a chatbot launch a day earlier that failed to impress.

On Thursday, attendees of the Chinese search engine giant’s presentation panned the company’s lack of a live demonstration and a public launch, comparing it to the November launch of US research lab OpenAI’s ChatGPT capabilities and free-to-use.

But later in the day, some users who received invitation codes to try Ernie began testing Chinese chatbot posts and livestreams, and comparing them side-by-side with US chatbots such as Microsoft’s Bing Chatbot, which is powered by ChatGPT. Technology.

A user described on the Weibo social media platform how Ernie correctly answered a question about the condition of Hong Kong philosopher Zhang Jinqing.

“The reaction was fine”, said the user.

“There is a certain gap between Arnie bot and Bing, but it’s not too big, in some questions (Arnie) even performed better than Bing,” according to a Weibo post by technology blogger Chapingjun, who has more than 2.4 million followers.

Analysts also said that the initial disappointment felt in the market since the launch realized that the Chinese search engine giant is still in the best position to create China’s strongest challenger to ChatGPT.

“Market demand for industrial application of simple large-scale models is rapidly stimulated, and (Baidu) is expected to rely on historical savings and first-mover advantage to rapidly acquire users and data,” CITIC Securities said in a research note. Friday

More than 75,000 corporate users have applied for a trial of an Ernie API developed by Baidu Cloud, the Chinese company said Friday in a video posted on its official WeChat account.

(Reporting by Eduardo Baptista and Jason Jue; Additional reporting by Brenda Goh; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Gerry Doyle)