China's search engine giant Baidu on Monday held an event about artificial intelligence (AI) nowhere in the physical world. Instead, they moved the event location to its metaverse.

We at CGTN Digital Sci-tech logged into the metaverse and joined the event, which turned out to be a terrible experience. We had to resort to a traditional video stream to finish watching the show.

Baidu CEO Robin Li beamed into the virtual venue in "Xirang," Baidu's metaverse product released in November, to talk about his vision for AI in the next ten years.

"No doubt, China is a fertile ground for AI," he claimed. "And the creators will usher in the golden decade."

During the 90-minute event, Li performed a monologue to list Baidu's current technologies for AI, spanning from open-source neural networks to driverless car hardware. He also invited guests such as rocket scientists and macrophysics researchers to talk about their vision of AI's future.

While Li and guests talked, I navigated a Xirang avatar with my smartphone into the virtual venue and sat it with many others to watch the 3D show, until minutes later, the mobile app suddenly stopped responding and dragged me back to reality.

So, I watched the rest of the event the old way – with a web browser on my work computer.

As one of the herald enterprises in China's internet market, Baidu did accumulate a sizable number of technologies about algorithms that power the AI, especially as they have been the most-used search engine in China for more than a decade.

But that won't justify the Beijing-based company distributing a half-baked metaverse product and ruining the show.

As a tech editor with more than two decades of video game experience, I can clearly tell that Xirang is far from a demo that can be rolled out to the public. Clipping happens so often that I stopped trusting objects in the metaverse, and the artistic quality of those objects is below industrial average in the 2000s.

And you cannot create new objects in this world as of now.

To ensure I'm not the only one experiencing difficulties with Xirang, I searched on baidu.com for other people's comments. I was welcomed by hundreds of people ranting about how Xirang "should have a minus score" and "wasted such a romantic name."

The experience made me wonder. Baidu stood with Alibaba and Tencent and created the "BAT" age of China's internet. But meme has it that the letter B now is represented more by ByteDance.

Baidu needs to create a bunch of solid products to remind users of its vast storage of AI techs. Time to open the weapon storage and fight for your company's future, Robin.