Baidu discloses its ChatGPT rival now has 100M+ users

Baidu Inc., the operator of China’s hottest search engine, has revealed that its Ernie Bot chatbot service is now utilized by greater than 100 million consumers.

Based on Reuters, Baidu Chief Technology Officer Wang Haifeng disclosed the milestone today at a man-made intelligence event in Beijing. The news comes about five months after Ernie Bot became generally available. The chatbot’s mobile version reportedly passed 1 million users inside a day of its release.

Ernie Bot is the fruit of a development effort that Baidu launched in 2019. It’s based on an internally developed large language model called ERNIE, or Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration. The model supports most of the same use cases akin to OpenAI’s GPT-4: It’s able to writing and rewriting text, summarizing existing documents and generating code.

Baidu revealed Ernie Bot in March. The corporate tested the chatbot with a limited variety of users for about five months before making it generally available in late August. A couple of weeks later, Baidu introduced an upgraded version of Ernie Bot powered by a brand new AI system dubbed Ernie 4.0.

The corporate claims the upgraded chatbot offers “drastically improved performance in understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory.” It also provides image and video generation features. Based on Baidu, Ernie Bot can generate a multimedia file in just a few minutes based on a prompt and a sample image provided by the user.

The corporate is monetizing the chatbot with a paid version that debuted in November. The paid version reportedly costs 59.9 yuan, or about $8.4, per 30 days.

Alongside its flagship search engine and Ernie Bot, Baidu offers a spread of other services including a mapping service just like Google Maps. The corporate generated $17.9 billion in revenue from its applications during its last fiscal yr. After making Ernie Bot generally available in August, Baidu announced plans to supply a “suite of recent AI-native apps” alongside the chatbot.

The corporate can also be integrating AI features into its existing services. Following a recent upgrade to Ernie Bot, Baidu debuted a tool that permits users of its cloud-based file storage service to retrieve documents with natural language prompts. The corporate also introduced an AI summarization feature for its flagship search engine.

Baidu and China’s other leading tech firms have reportedly made significant investments in Nvidia Corp. chips to support their AI development efforts. In August, the Financial Times reported that Baidu, ByteDance Ltd. Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. had ordered about 100,000 A800 graphics cards for delivery by yr’s end. The A800 is a modified version of Nvidia’s high-end A100 graphics cards that was developed to comply with U.S. export controls on AI chip sales to China.

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