Chinese search engine giant Baidu’s chatbot Ernie Bot has been through four major upgrades since it was launched back in March, according to Robin Li, Baidu’s founder and CEO.?

Back then the ChatGPT-like product was shown to be competent at generating images from text prompts, composing “poetry” and producing audio in Chinese Erne has gone on to summarize financial statements and produce PowerPoint presentations, among other capabilities.

Li told a company meeting that the cost of large model training has been reduced to one-tenth of the previous cost. In other words, efficiency has increased nearly tenfold.

Baidu’s shares in Hong Kong rose as much as 5 percent on Friday. Other tech company shares, including Meituan, JD.com and Zhihu were also lifted.