China’s Baidu’s AI chatbot ‘Ernie Bot’ surpass 200 million users

Ernie Bot record users: China's leading technology company, Baidu announced on Tuesday that its artificial intelligence chatbot, "Ernie Bot," has surpassed 200 million users, to become China's premier ChatGPT-like chatbot amid intensifying competition. The user base has approximately doubled since the company's last update in December, with the chatbot having been publicly available for eight months.

Baidu CEO Robin Li disclosed that Ernie Bot's application programming interface (API) is used 200 million times daily, indicating the frequency with which users engage the chatbot for various tasks. Moreover, the number of enterprise clients for Ernie Bot has reached 85,000. 

In February, Li informed analysts that Baidu had begun generating revenue from Ernie Bot. Throughout the fourth quarter, the company earned several hundred million yuan by using AI to improve its advertising services and assist other enterprises in developing their own AI models.

Ernie Bot, introduced last March as China's inaugural domestically developed ChatGPT-like chatbot, received approval for public release in August, becoming one of the first eight AI chatbots sanctioned by Beijing.

In contrast to many other nations, China mandates that companies obtain approval prior to launching generative AI services. However, recent data indicates that rival domestic AI services, notably the "Kimi" chatbot from the Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot AI, are rapidly gaining ground on Ernie Bot.

According to AIcpb.com, a platform tracking user visits to online AI services, Ernie Bot received a total of 14.9 million visits across its application and website last month, while Kimi garnered 12.6 million visits during the same period. Notably, Kimi's visitation rate surged by 321.6 per cent in March compared to February, outpacing Ernie Bot's growth rate of over 48 per cent.

Despite these advancements, Chinese generative AI services still trail behind their Western counterparts globally. OpenAI's ChatGPT remains the world's most popular generative AI service, with total traffic reaching 1.86 billion views last month, according to AIcpb.com.

China has expedited approvals for AI services in recent months, recognizing AI as a pivotal domain in which the country must compete with the United States. State media reported last week that 117 large AI models have received approvals thus far, indicating the government's commitment to fostering AI innovation and development.

(With Reuters inputs)