Ernie Bot, the Chinese Competitor to ChatGPT, Hits 200 Million Users

Chinese tech company, Baidu, has reported that its AI chatbot, Ernie Bot, has reached a user base of over 200 million. This figure marks a doubling of users since December.

A Chatbot in Demand

According to Robin Li, Baidu’s CEO, the Ernie Bot’s application programming interface (API) is utilized 200 million times daily. This usage figure signifies the number of tasks the chatbot is asked to perform by its users each day. Furthermore, the number of enterprise clients for the chatbot has touched 85,000, as revealed by Li at a conference in Shenzhen.

Revenue Generation and Approval

Baidu has begun to generate revenue from Ernie Bot, and in the last quarter, the company earned several hundreds of millions of yuan by using AI to enhance its advertising services and assist other companies in building their models.

Ernie Bot, a locally developed ChatGPT-like chatbot, was first announced in China last March and received approval for public release in August. In China, unlike many other countries, companies need to secure approval before launching generative AI services.

Competition Heating Up

Recent information indicates that other domestic AI services, especially the “Kimi” chatbot from Alibaba-backed start-up Moonshot AI, are rapidly gaining ground on Ernie Bot. AIcpb.com, a website that monitors user visits to online AI services, reported that Ernie Bot had a total of 14.9 million visits across its app and website last month, while Kimi recorded 12.6 million visits.

Growth rates also suggest a fierce competition, with visits to Kimi soaring by 321.6 percent in March from February, whereas the number of visits to Ernie Bot grew by over 48 percent.

Even though Chinese generative AI services are making strides, they still trail their Western counterparts significantly. AIcpb.com data shows that OpenAI’s ChatGPT remains the world’s most popular generative AI service, with total traffic growing by 9 percent to reach 1.86 billion views last month.

AI: A Key Tech Sector for China

China has been speeding up approvals for AI services recently, having identified AI as a critical tech sector where it must contend with the United States. State media reported last week that 117 large AI models had received approvals so far.