Baidu’s AI chatbot breaches 200 million users 13 months after launch

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Baidu‘s large language model (LLM), Ernie Bot, has reached over 200 million users and 85,000 corporate clients, just 13 months after the bot’s launch. The Chinese giant’s CEO, Robin Li, shared these details at the Baidu AI conference in Shenzhen, the South China Morning Post reported.

The company introduced Ernie, which stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, as a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT in March 2023. By October, it had introduced an updated version, which Li said at that time was already comparable to ChatGPT-4, OpenAI’s most recent iteration of its LLM.

As ChatGPT is unavailable in mainland China, local tech giants are racing to take its place in a market set to reach US$23.9 billion by 2027, according to Statista. As SCMP reported, over 200 other LLMs are competing in the country.

Still, Baidu is betting big it could take a significant slice of the pie. At the conference, Li revealed three new Ernie-based tools to help developers create applications and models, some of which don’t require coding.

“[The] LLM itself doesn’t create value directly, and only AI apps developed [using LLMs] can meet the real market demand,” Li said.

These tools are set to increase Ernie’s revenue contribution to the Chinese tech giant. During Baidu’s earnings call in February, Li reported that Ernie accounted for about 7.8% ofBaidu’s total cloud service’s revenue in the fourth quarter of 2023, which translates to around US$90.6 million.

Last month, Apple was also reported to be in early-stage talks with Baidu on possibly incorporating the latter’s genAI tech into the former’s products in China.

See also: Can chiplets power China’s genAI ambition?