China’s Baidu said on Tuesday that its artificial intelligence chatbot ‘Ernie Bot’ has amassed more than 200 million users, seeking to remain China’s most popular chatbot like ChatGPT amid growing competition. .
The number of users has roughly doubled since the company’s last update last December. The chatbot was released to the public eight months ago.
Baidu CEO Robin Li also said that Ernie Bot’s application programming interface (API) is used 200 million times every day. This means that the chatbot receives requests from users to perform tasks multiple times a day.
The number of enterprise customers using chatbots has reached 85,000, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen.
Last February, he told analysts that Baidu had started to generate revenue from Ernie, and in the fourth quarter the company earned hundreds of millions of yuan by using AI to improve advertising services 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 was only approved for public launch in August, one of the first eight AI chatbots approved by Beijing.
Unlike many other countries, China requires companies to obtain approval before launching generative AI services.
Recent data shows that domestic rival AI services, especially the ‘Kimi’ chatbot from 12-month-old Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot AI, are fast catching up to Ernie Bot.
Ernie Bot had a total of 14.9 million visits across apps and websites last month, while Kimi had a total of 12.6 million visits in the same month, according to data from AIcpb.com, a site that tracks user visits to online AI services. .
And Kimi grew even faster, with a 321.6% increase in visits in March compared to February, while Ernie Bot visits increased more than 48%, the data showed.
Globally, China’s generative AI services still lag far behind their Western counterparts. OpenAI’s ChatGPT remains the world’s most popular generative AI service, with total traffic up 9% in the past month, reaching 1.86 billion views, according to AIcpb.com.
In recent months, China has accelerated approvals for AI services after highlighting AI as a key area of technology where China must compete with the United States. State media reported that 117 large AI models have been approved so far.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
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