Baidu's AI Chatbot, Ernie Bot, Used By More Than 200 Million Users

Baidu CEO, Robin Li (photo: @baidu_inc)

JAKARTA - Baidu announced on Tuesday April 16, that their artificial intelligence chatbot, "Ernie Bot," has managed to attract more than 200 million users as they seek to remain chatbots like China's most popular ChatGPT amid growing competition.

The number of users is almost violent since the company's last update in December 2023. 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 asked by users to carry out these tasks every day.

"The number of company clients for the chatbot reached 85,000," Li said at a conference in Shenzhen.

In February, Li notified analysts that Baidu was starting to generate revenue from Ernie, and in the fourth quarter the company had generated several hundred million yuan using artificial intelligence to improve its advertising services and help other companies build their own models.

In March last year, Ernie Bot became the first locally developed artificial intelligence chatbot to be announced in China, but only received approval for release to the public in August, one of Beijing's eight artificial intelligence chatbots.

Unlike many other countries, China requires companies to get approval before launching a generating artificial intelligence service.

Recent data show that rival domestic artificial intelligence services, especially "Kimi" chatbots from Alibaba-backed startups named 12-month-old Moonshot AI, are chasing Ernie Bot quickly.

Ernie Bot was visited a total of 14.9 million times on her app and website last month, while Kimi had a total visit of 12.6 million in the same month. This is known from AICpb.com data, a site that tracks user visits to intelligence services made online, indicating.

Kimi grew much faster, with visits increasing by 321.6% in March from February, while the number of visits to Ernie Bot grew by more than 48%, according to the data.

Globally, China's generative artificial intelligence services are still far behind its Western competitors. According to AICpb.com, OpenAI's ChatGPT remains the world's most popular generating artificial intelligence service, with total traffic increasing by 9% to 1.86 billion visits last month.

In recent months, China has accelerated approval for artificial intelligence services after highlighting artificial intelligence as a key area in technology where China will compete with the United States. Last week, Chinese media reported that 117 large artificial intelligence models have received approval so far.