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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 Ernie Bot's application programming
interface (API) is being used 200 million times everyday,
meaning the chatbot was requested by its user to conduct tasks
that many times a day.
The number of enterprise clients for the chatbot reached 85,000,
Li said at a conference in Shenzhen.
In February, he told analysts Baidu was starting to generate
revenue from Ernie, and in 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-like
chatbot to be announced in China, but it only won approval for
public release in August, one of the first eight AI chatbots
that Beijing approved.
Unlike many other countries, China requires companies to obtain
approval before rolling out generative AI services.
Recent data shows that rival domestic AI services, particularly
the “Kimi” chatbot from a 12-month-old, Alibaba-backed start-up
named Moonshot AI, are quickly catching up with Ernie Bot.
Ernie Bot was visited a total of 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 was growing much faster, with visits jumping 321.6% in
March from February, while the number of visits to Ernie Bot
grew 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 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 tech where China
will have to compete with the U.S. Last week, state media
reported 117 large AI models have received approvals so far.
(Reporting by Josh Ye; Editing by Tom Hogue and Sonali Paul)
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