Baidu (BIDU) reported that its AI chatbot, Ernie, topped over 100 million users, causing shares of the company to trend upwards. Baidu’s chatbot is a part of a larger play to expand its AI presence. Meanwhile, popular OpenAI bot ChatGPT (MSFT) has faced a lawsuit from the New York Times, alleging that the bot uses direct material from the NYT to answer questions. Yahoo Finance Anchors Diane King Hall and Rachelle Akuffo break down the latest developments for these companies and what it means moving forward.
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DIANE KING HALL: Move over ChatGPT, the AI battle is heating up. China’s Baidu saying its AI bot now tops 100 million users at a summit in Beijing. The latest development sending the stock higher this week. Its Ernie Bot– that’s what it’s dubbed– was released to the public in late August.
Now, Baidu’s chat bot is part of a larger strategy to expand its AI plays. And this is a milestone for Baidu this week with regard to its AI strategy and increasing. And look, it is certainly playing catch up. Rachelle, when you think about ChatGPT and it being more than a year on the market and the fast adoption of that. So again, this milestone that the Ernie Bot is hitting– I mean, what a funny name to me– for its AI chatbot.
And you think about right now, there is some potential for it to gain more momentum compared to ChatGPT when we certainly know the speed bump that ChatGPT faced this week with regard to that lawsuit from “The New York Times”, which said that OpenAI infringed on its IP.
RACHELLE AKUFFO: Indeed, I mean, so I think at some point, the Ernie Bot’s going to face the same sort of challenges. And right now, I believe we’re at the ealry for a rendition of it now, just as you have ChatGPT 4 as well.
We saw that Baidu CEO Robin Li said that Baidu itself, the company, will be collecting massive real world human information and feedback and then use that to help fuel the information that they will use for Ernie and Baidu’s foundation models, and seeing improvements in comprehension, reasoning, memory generation using these algorithms.
But again, it did race to the top of the App Store in China because it was free. But then you have to wonder as we see more of these lawsuits, more of these infringement lawsuits popping up, whether or not the Ernie Bot will be subject to the same sort of scrutiny.
Obviously, a different model in China as to what we see over here. But perhaps, as we still wait to see more sort of international regulation on AI and how it’s sourcing some of this data, perhaps we’ll see some momentum there. And if that’s reached, perhaps that will sort of level the playing ground here. But an interesting development here. We’ll wait till we get, I guess, more information on just how far Ernie can go.