Robin Li, chairman and chief executive officer of Baidu Inc., during a launch event for the company's Ernie Bot in Beijing, China, March 16, 2023. Credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images
Last week, the public got a peek at China’s best shot at competing in the chatbot craze when search giant Baidu released its chatbot, named Ernie. It didn’t go well.
Baidu’s stock fell 10 percent shortly after Ernie’s reveal, largely because CEO Robin Li demonstrated Ernie’s capabilities with a pre-recorded video, not a live demo, leaving many doubtful about the chatbot’s true capabilities. (Baidu’s stock has since rebounded.) While internet users are free to experiment with San Francisco-based OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Baidu’s product still isn’t fully available for public testing.
Part of the reason for Ernie’s delayed rollout may be Beijing’s apprehension about the technology.
Indeed, Chinese developers face one major hurdle that their Western competitors don’t: their government’s draconian information controls. As internet users in the West have shown, generative AI models like ChatGPT are hard to tame, spitting out unexpected and some
Exclusive longform investigative journalism, Q&As, news and analysis, and data on Chinese business elites and corporations. We publish China scoops you won't find anywhere else.
A weekly curated reading list on China from David Barboza, Pulitzer Prize-winning former Shanghai correspondent for The New York Times.
A daily roundup of China finance, business and economics headlines.
We offer discounts for groups, institutions and students. Go to our Subscriptions page for details.
On Thursday, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo met with Wang Wentao, the Chinese Commerce Minister, in Washington. It marked the first cabinet-level meeting in Washington between the U.S. and China during the Biden administration, and it was a signal of the Commerce Department’s increasingly central role in the current U.S.-China relationship. Usually, the Commerce Department is far from the center of anything, but as Katrina Northrop reports, the department is uniquely suited to address the China challenge.
The lawyer and author talks about the attack on a train in the 1920s which created an international incident, the rise of the Communist Party and the conditions for foreign media in China today.
