Baidu announced on Tuesday that its artificial intelligence chatbot, "Ernie Bot," has exceeded 200 million users as it aims to maintain its position as China's leading ChatGPT-like chatbot in a competitive market. This marks a doubling in user numbers since December, just eight months after Ernie Bot's public release.
Baidu's CEO, Robin Li, highlighted that Ernie Bot's application programming interface (API) is accessed 200 million times daily. Additionally, the chatbot has attracted 85,000 enterprise clients, Li shared at a conference in Shenzhen.
Baidu started generating revenue from Ernie in February, with the company earning several hundred million yuan in the fourth quarter by leveraging AI to enhance its advertising services and assisting other companies in building AI models.
Ernie Bot was the first domestically developed ChatGPT-like chatbot announced in China last March. It received approval for public release in August, becoming one of the first eight AI chatbots approved by Beijing. China mandates companies to secure approval before launching generative AI services.
Despite Ernie Bot's success, rival AI services are rapidly catching up. Moonshot AI, an Alibaba-backed startup, introduced its "Kimi" chatbot, which has been gaining traction. In March, Ernie Bot recorded 14.9 million visits across its app and website, while Kimi registered 12.6 million visits, according to AIcpb.com, a site tracking user visits to online AI services. Notably, Kimi's visits surged by 321.6% in March compared to February, outpacing Ernie Bot's 48% growth.
On a global scale, Chinese generative AI services still trail behind Western counterparts. OpenAI's ChatGPT remains the world's most popular generative AI service, with its total traffic reaching 1.86 billion views last month, as per AIcpb.com data.
China has been fast-tracking AI service approvals, recognizing AI as a crucial area where it needs to compete with the U.S. State media recently reported that 117 large AI models have received approvals to date.
