Chinese Google alternative Baidu.com (NASDAQ:BIDU) enjoyed a strong rebound on the Hong Kong exchange on Friday, a day after suffering significant losses following the launch of its highly anticipated ChatGPT clone Ernie Bot.
Ernie’s launch failed to impress when an hour-long presentation used pre-recorded videos and made no mention of a public launch date.
But Ernie has received a warmer response now that a few users who received invite codes have begun to post live stream tests of the chatbot.
Tech blogger Chapingjun, who has more than 2.4 million followers, also posted on Weibo that there was a "definite gap" between Ernie and Bing, but that Ernie had even outperformed Bing on certain questions.
Over 75,000 corporate users have applied for a trial of an Ernie API developed by Baidu Cloud, according to a video published on Baidu's official WeChat account.
Baidu’s Ernie bot is based off its AI-driven deep learning model, Ernie - short for "Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration".
By the end of the Hong Kong trading session, Baidu was up 14% to 142.2 Hong Kong dollars with a market capitalisation of 345 Hong Kong dollars £36bn).
Baidu was not the only firm to deliver an underwhelming ChatGPT clone.
Google’s Bard launch in February stumbled when the chatbot gave incorrect answers to fielded questions.
Google recently invested £300mln in AI start-up anthropic, along with Cohere and C3.ai, and will use these companies to scale AI systems and computing powers for its developers.