Baidu says Ernie bot users have doubled since December

Chinese tech giant

Baidu

has said that its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot,

Ernie Bot

, has accumulated more than 200 million users – roughly double the number since the company's last update in December 2023. According to a report by the news agency Reuters, this has helped the chatbot to remain China's most popular ChatGPT-like tool amid fierce competition.

What the company has to say

In a statement to Reuters, Baidu CEO

Robin Li

said that Ernie Bot's application programming interface (API) is being used 200 million times every day. This number suggests that the chatbot was requested by its users many times a day to conduct various tasks.
At a conference in Shenzhen, Li also noted that the number of enterprise clients for the chatbot has reached 85,000.

In February, Li told analysts that Baidu was starting to generate revenue from Ernie. In the fourth quarter of the last fiscal year, the company also earned several hundred million yuan using AI to improve its ad services and help other companies build their models.

China’s rules for AI chatbots

Baidu introduced Ernie Bot as the first locally-developed ChatGPT-like chatbot in China in March 2023 but got approval for public release in August. It was one of the first eight AI chatbots that were approved by Beijing.

Unlike most other countries, Chinese companies need to obtain approval before rolling out their generative AI services in the country
The report also cited data from AIcpb.com (a site that tracks user visits to online AI services) to reveal that rival domestic AI services, especially the "

Kimi

" chatbot developed by an Alibaba-backed start-up named Moonshot AI, are also quickly catching up with Ernie Bot.

Ernie Bot vs Kimi chatbot: How they compete

Last month, Ernie Bot was visited by a total of 14.9 million users across its app and website. Meanwhile, in the same month, Kimi had a total of 12.6 million visits, AIcpb.com data showed.
The data also showed that Kimi is growing much faster. Usage of Kimi has increased by 321.6% between March and February. On the other hand, the number of visits to Ernie Bot grew more than 48%, the data showed.