China’s answer to ChatGPT? Baidu shares tumble as Ernie Bot disappoints

China’s Baidu unveiled its much-awaited artificial intelligence-powered chatbot known as Ernie Bot on Thursday, but disappointed investors with its use of pre-recorded videos and the lack of a public launch, sending its shares tumbling.

The just over an hour-long presentation, which came two days after Alphabet Inc’s Google unveiled a flurry of AI tools for its email, collaboration and cloud software, gave the world a glimpse of what could be China’s strongest rival to US research lab OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

But unlike ChatGPT, which last November launched as a free to use chatbot to the public, Baidu limited the presentation to brief videos that showed Ernie carrying out mathematical calculations,