March 16, 2023: Baidu CEO Robin Li unveils Ernie Bot at a Beijing press event. No live interaction — every prompt is a canned demo video. Li explains 'for time reasons.' Baidu stock plummets $3B during the stream. The chatbot goes live to 1M users a week later and immediately fails basic logic: cannot count letters in words, cannot do multi-digit arithmetic, refuses any politically sensitive query with 'let's talk about something else.' Chinese Gen Z memes it relentlessly. Baidu ships Ernie 4.0 eight months later.