China's Baidu said on Tuesday that its artificial intelligence chatbot “Ernie Bot” has gained more than 200 million users as it seeks to remain the most popular ChatGPT-like chatbot in China amid competition increasingly fierce.
The number of users has roughly 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 that Ernie Bot's application programming interface (API) is used 200 million times a day, meaning its user asked the chatbot to perform tasks many times a day.
The number of business customers for the chatbot reached 85,000, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen.
In February, he told analysts that Baidu was starting to generate revenue from Ernie, and by the fourth quarter the company had earned several hundred million yuan using AI to improve its ad services and help other companies build their own models
Last March, Ernie Bot was the first locally developed ChatGPT-type chatbot to be announced in China, but it only got approval for public release in August, one of the first eight AI chatbots to Beijing approved.
Unlike many other countries, China requires companies to obtain approval before deploying generative AI services.
Recent data shows that rival domestic AI services, especially the “Kimi” chatbot from a 12-month-old Alibaba-backed start-up called Moonshot AI, are quickly catching up with Ernie Bot.
Ernie Bot was visited a total of 14.9 million times on its app and website last month, while Kimi had a total of 12.6 million visits in the same month, AIcpb data showed. com, a site that tracks user visits to online AI services. .
And Kimi was growing much faster, with visits jumping 321.6% in March from February, while the number of visits to Ernie Bot grew by more than 48%, the data showed.
Globally, Chinese generative AI services still lag far behind their Western counterparts. According to AIcpb.com, OpenAI's ChatGPT remains the world's most popular generative AI service, with total traffic growing 9% to 1.86 billion views last month.
In recent months, China has accelerated approvals for AI services after highlighting AI as a key area of technology where China will have to compete with the U.S. Last week, state media reported that 117 large models of AI have received approvals so far.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is automatically generated from a syndicated feed.)
