Baidu's Ernie AI chatbot fails to impress, shares tumble.

Baidu unveiled its AI-powered chatbot, Ernie Bot, which can do math, write poems, generate images and video. However, the lack of a public launch and scripted event with pre-recorded videos disappointed investors, causing Baidu's shares to tumble. Ernie Bot will only be open for trial to an initial group of users with invitation codes from Thursday, while companies can apply to embed the bot into their products via Baidu's cloud platform. Baidu is seen as a leader in a race in China among tech giants and startups to develop a rival to Microsoft's ChatGPT.