China’s Baidu cancels showcase for ChatGPT rival Ernie

The Beijing-based search giant is changing from a showcase to a closed-door event for businesses, citing “strong demand.”

Chinese tech giant Baidu has called off a livestreamed public event to promote its ChatGPT rival Ernie.

Baidu said Monday it had canceled a planned showcase that would be open to the media and public, in favor of a closed-door meeting with companies testing the artificial intelligence-powered bot.

Baidu, China’s largest search engine provider, said it changed the format of the event to meet “strong demand” from 120,000 companies lining up to test Ernie.

Baidu revealed Ernie to a muted response earlier this month, joining a stampede of companies rolling out rivals to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has taken the tech world by storm since its launch last November.

Baidu’s shares fell after a pre-recorded demonstration by Chief Executive Robin Li on March 16 showed Ernie was missing features included in Chat GPT’s successor GPT-4, including the ability to generate text in response to an image. The company’s stock later rallied strongly as users shared their experiences with the platform online.

Tech analysts say China’s efforts to mimic Chat GPT have been hampered by Beijing’s strict controls on the Internet, which provide the resources chatbots use to mimic human speech, though local versions like Ernie could still succeed at the domestic market.

The Chinese government has pledged to ramp up support for AI development, and the country’s tech giants, including Huawei, Alibaba and Tencent, are working on their own versions of the technology.