China’s Baidu said on Tuesday its artificial intelligence chatbot “Ernie Bot” has more than 200 million users, as it seeks to maintain its status as the country’s most popular ChatGPT-like chatbot amid growing competition.
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, which means the chatbot is requested by users to perform tasks multiple times a day.
The chatbot has 85,000 enterprise customers, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen.
In February, he told analysts that Baidu started to generate revenue from Ernie, and in the fourth quarter the company earned hundreds of millions of yuan from using artificial intelligence to improve its advertising services and help other companies build their own models.
Ernie Bot was the first locally developed ChatGPT-like chatbot announced in China in March last year, but it did not receive approval for public release until August, becoming one of the first eight artificial intelligence chatbots approved by Beijing.
Unlike many other countries, China requires companies to obtain approval before launching generative AI services.
Recent data shows that domestic competitors in artificial intelligence services, especially the 12-month-old “Kimi” chatbot launched by Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot AI, are quickly catching up with Ernie Bot.
According to AIcpb.com, a website that tracks user access to online artificial intelligence services, Ernie Bot had a total of 14.9 million visits on its app and website last month, while Kimi had a total of 12.6 million visits in the same month. . .
Data shows that Kimi is growing much faster, with visits in March increasing by 321.6% compared to February, while visits to Ernie Bot have increased by more than 48%.
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% last month to 1.86 billion views.
In recent months, China has accelerated the approval of artificial intelligence services after highlighting it as a key technology area in which it must compete with the United States. Last week, state media reported that 117 large-scale AI models had been approved so far.
© Thomson Reuters 2024
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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