This is why I roll my eyes when people say “omg chinas AI tech is gonna surpass us imminently!!!”
When it comes to tech that they don’t have the blueprints to easily copy, China’s iteration tends to be mediocre at best.
There’s a reason they’re still so behind when it comes to things like space travel, military tech, and jet planes. The US doesn’t allow their companies to manufacture those things in China, so they can’t copy it.
“During the highly publicized and eagerly anticipated news conference for Ernie, Baidu founder Robin Li stood beside an open chat screen, narrating questions that had earlier been typed into the chatbot. He admitted the company was only showing a demo of the technology that it had prepared earlier.
Ernie’s planned launch comes as US groups such as OpenAI and Google continue making strides in pushing forward their development of generative AI.
At the end of the roughly 45-minute demonstration, a chorus of WeChat users chimed in with variations of: “That’s it?” Two Baidu employees said they were equally disappointed with the rollout.
OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT last November had caught Baidu off guard, two people close to the company’s AI efforts said, noting they did not believe the US group had significantly superior technology until that point.
“We can only explore by ourselves. Training ChatGPT took OpenAI more than a year, and it took them another year to tune GPT-4,” said one Baidu employee. “It means we’re two years behind.” “