Baidu says AI chatbot ‘Ernie Bot’ has attracted 200 million users

Baidu says AI chatbot ‘Ernie Bot’ has attracted 200 million users

China’s Baidu ( 9888.HK ) said on Tuesday that its artificial intelligence chatbot “Ernie Bot” has gained more than 200 million users as it strives to remain the most popular ChatGPT-like chatbot in China amid intensifying competition.

The number of users has doubled since the company’s last update in December. The chatbot was released to the public eight months ago.

Baidu CEO Robin Li also said Ernie Bot’s application programming interface (API) is used 200 million times per day, meaning that the chatbot has been asked by its users to perform tasks many times a day.

The number of enterprise customers for chatbots has reached 85,000, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen.

In February, he told analysts Baidu started to generate revenue from Ernie, and in the fourth quarter the company had earned several hundred million yuan using AI to improve its ad service and help other companies build their own models.

Last March, Ernie Bot was the first locally developed ChatGPT-like chatbot announced in China, but it only got approval for public release in August, one of the first eight AI chatbots approved by Beijing.

Also read: Ernie Bots like Baidu’s ChatGPT have more than 100 million users

Unlike many other countries, China requires companies to obtain approval before launching generative AI services.

Recent data shows that rival domestic AI services, notably the “Kimi” chatbot from a 12-month-old Alibaba-backed startup called Moonshot AI, are quickly catching up to Ernie Bot.

Ernie Bot was visited 14.9 million times across its app and website last month, while Kimi had a total of 12.6 million visits in the same month, data from AIcpb.com, a site that tracks user visits to online AI services, showed.

And Kimi grew even faster, with visits jumping 321.6% in March from February, while the number of visits to Ernie Bot increased by more than 48%, the data showed.

Globally, China’s generative AI services still lag far behind their Western counterparts. According to AIcpb.com, OpenAI’s ChatGPT remains the most popular generative AI service in the world, with total traffic increasing 9% to reach 1.86 billion views last month.

In recent months, China has accelerated approvals for AI services after highlighting AI as a key area in technology where China needs to compete with the US. Last week, state media reported 117 major AI models had received approval so far.