The Chinese internet giant Baidu unveiled last week in Beijing "Ernie Bot", its response to the American conversational robot ChatGPT, whose prowess is followed with passion in China despite its blockage.

ChatGPT, launched in November by Californian start-up OpenAI, allows you to formulate detailed answers on a wide range of topics in seconds, write essays or create audiovisual content.

ChatGPT is inaccessible in China without bypass software (VPN) and foreign phone number. But it is popular despite everything because it is the subject of many media articles and discussions on social networks.

Baidu was one of the first Chinese groups to position itself to offer an equivalent to ChatGPT.

Ernie Bot's press presentation last Thursday, however, was limited to pre-recorded sequences and a simple algebra equation to solve.

Sensitive content

No live interaction with the chatbot has been proposed, in a country where digital companies are constantly under pressure from the authorities to eradicate any content deemed sensitive or politically incorrect.

Baidu shares lost nearly 10% on the stock market, before rebounding the next day driven by positive comments from a handful of testers of its robot, including analysts at Citigroup bank.

Baidu co-founder and boss Robin Li during the presentation of "Ernie Bot" in Beijing on March 16, 2023 © MICHAEL ZHANG / AFP/Archives

No consumer launch date has been announced for Ernie Bot, which operates in Mandarin and targets only the Chinese market.

The headache for developers in China is to offer a powerful conversational robot that does not deviate from the very strict framework allowed in terms of content.

When asked, for example, if Chinese President Xi Jinping is a good leader, a conversational robot designed by the prestigious Tsinghua University in Beijing kicks the can down the road, and invites you to "seize a new request".

"Regulation and censorship of content in China" are clearly obstacles, says Lauren Hurcombe, a technology specialist at law firm DLA Piper.

As a result, Chinese firms have "far less data" than their Western competitors to feed and train their systems, Hurcombe told AFP.

Fleas

Besides Mandarin, Ernie Bot understands some Chinese dialects but is not as good at English, the Baidu boss admitted Thursday.

Another challenge for Chinese companies is access to American technologies, such as chips capable of running the algorithms of conversational robots, at a time when Washington is multiplying restrictions in the name of national security.

Baidu co-founder and boss Robin Li during a presentation by Ernie Bot in Beijing on March 16, 2023. © MICHAEL ZHANG / AFP/Archives

China aims to become the world leader in artificial intelligence by 2030, revolutionizing a multitude of sectors including the automotive industry and medicine.

But it "will no longer have access" to the most powerful chips that run complex artificial intelligence, warns Lauren Hurcombe, who questions the ability to find Chinese alternatives as powerful.

"In 2016, China was already building world-leading supercomputers using its own chips," said Steven Miller, professor emeritus of information systems at the Singapore University of Management (SMU).

Baidu's headquarters in Beijing in 2022 © Jade GAO / AFP/Archives

"If that was the case seven years ago, it certainly has more capacity today to design high-end chips," Miller told AFP.

Baidu is armed and already makes its own chips.

Billions of parameters

All Chinese tech giants say they are preparing a conversational robot, like internet and video game heavyweight Tencent, or e-commerce champions Alibaba and JD.com.

Same craze in the United States, where the computer giant Google launched Tuesday in public access its own, Bard, in order to improve the quality of its responses.

But in the race for artificial intelligence, the United States had in 2021 twice as many start-ups as China and three times as much private investment in this field, according to the latest available data from Stanford University, which follows these issues.

Two years ago in Beijing, the Academy of Artificial Intelligence, a state body launched in 2018 to boost innovation, had already developed an ancestor of ChatGPT.

Named Wu Dao, it was described by its creators as "the world's largest artificial intelligence language model."

At the time, it had 1.750 billion parameters, 100 times more than the previous version of ChatGPT (GPT-3). But Wu Dao never really broke through.

© 2023 AFP