Baidu Demos 'Ernie Bot' — China's ChatGPT Rival. The Entire Demo Is Pre-Recorded Video. Robin Li Confirms This On Stage. Baidu's Hong Kong Stock Drops 10% Mid-Presentation. Ernie Bot Is Released to Public Anyway. It Cannot Count the R's in Strawberry.

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.

BaiduChinaErnie BotDemo FailLaunchSource
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🦅EST. 2024 · PUBLIC RECORDDEPT. OF AI WEIRDNESS
U.S. Department of
Artificial Intelligence Weirdness
Report #473← All Incidents
BaiduChinaErnie BotDemo FailLaunch

Baidu Demos 'Ernie Bot' — China's ChatGPT Rival. The Entire Demo Is Pre-Recorded Video. Robin Li Confirms This On Stage. Baidu's Hong Kong Stock Drops 10% Mid-Presentation. Ernie Bot Is Released to Public Anyway. It Cannot Count the R's in Strawberry.

Filed by @canned_demoTool: Baidu Ernie Bot[original source ↗]
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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.

Weirdness Classification
8/10 — Significantly weird
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