Baidu’s AI chatbot, Ernie Bot, has garnered over 100 million users since its public launch in August, according to an announcement made by Baidu Chief Technology Officer Wang Haifeng in a conference on Thursday, 28 December 2023.
Baidu’s AI chatbot amassed over 100 million users since August
In November, Baidu reported that Ernie had already attracted 70 million users. The announcement underscores Baidu’s efforts to compete with tech giants Tencent and Alibaba in commercialising services similar to ChatGPT in the vast Chinese internet landscape.
The increasing user base reflects the growing popularity and adoption of AI-driven chatbots, marking a significant milestone for Baidu’s foray into the competitive market of conversational AI services in China. In response to the rapidly growing generative AI technology, China’s State Internet Information Office, in conjunction with six other departments, has introduced interim regulations for the oversight of generative AI services.
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Effective from 15 August 2023, these regulations aim to manage and standardise the use of generative AI services. Notably, Baidu has taken the initiative to comply with these regulations by opening its Ernie Bot for public access.
This positions Baidu among the first Chinese companies authorised to offer regular public access to generative AI bots. The move not only expands the availability of Ernie Bot but also establishes a framework for the regulation and public utilisation of AI services in China.
In June this year, Baidu introduced Ernie 3.5, which “dramatically boosts inference throughput by an astonishing 17-fold compared to Ernie 3.0.”
According to Dr. Haifeng Wang, CTO of Baidu, the improvements are most evident in areas like creative writing, Q&A, reasoning, code generation, training performance, and inference performance.
