Days after announcing its rival to ChatGPT, Chinese search engine giant Baidu scrapped the launch of its multimodal large language model Ernie.

The webcast, scheduled for Monday afternoon, was switched to a closed-door event for firms, citing ‘strong demand’. The company stated that the modification in the arrangement was initiated to meet the “intense requirement” from 120,000 businesses that had requested to try out the Ernie robot. The company further mentioned that this would be the initial of numerous confidential meetings.

Baidu CEO Robin Li had introduced Ernie bot on March 16. During a live-streamed presentation, Li demonstrated a series of pre-recorded demos showcasing the various abilities of the Chinese chatbot to journalists.

Upon the preliminary reports about the cancellation, Baidu’s shares listed on the Hong Kong stock market dropped by 4.5% on Monday morning. The company’s stock price had also declined initially while the CEO was still presenting the bot, but it recovered the following day. This rebound was partly due to high demand for generative artificial intelligence (AI) from the Chinese business industry.

Apparently, the chatbot—-ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration) has been into tests for around a decade, according to Baidu CEO Robin Li. 

The company has been actively spending in AI research and development and spent about 21.4 billion yuan ($3.1 billion) in 2022 alone. 

During the presentation of Ernie Bot, Li acknowledged that the chatbot is not flawless. However, he explained that they are unveiling it due to market demand. Furthermore, Li mentioned that the model will also be incorporated into the search engine.

Pros and Cons

Interestingly the model can function in two languages, English and Chinese, and is also multimodal. In addition to its language generation capabilities, the model can also perform text-to-image tasks known as ERNIE-ViLG. This latest chatbot is now powered by the third iteration of the LLM, ERNIE 3.0 Titan, which contains 260 billion parameters, representing a 50% increase compared to ChatGPT’s parameters.

According to the South China Morning Post, Ernie Bot is also able to offer real-time information unlike its rival ChatGPT. But political censorship has forced the makers to train the bot in a way that it avoids political questions like whether China is a democratic nation, responding vaguely: “hasn’t learned how to answer this question yet”.