HONG KONG (Reuters) – China’s Baidu (NASDAQ:) said on Tuesday its artificial intelligence chatbot “Ernie Bot” has amassed more than 200 million users as it aims to remain the most popular ChatGPT-style chatbot in China amid increasingly fierce competition.
Robin Li, CEO of the Chinese internet company, revealed the new milestone at a conference in Shenzhen on Tuesday. The chatbot was introduced to the public eight months ago.
The company last reported its user count in December, when it topped 100 million.
Lee also said Ernie Bot’s application programming interface (API) is used 200 million times a day, meaning a user requests the chatbot to perform tasks many times a day.
The number of corporate chatbot clients has reached 85,000, Lee added.
Last March, Ernie Bot was the first locally developed ChatGPT-like chatbot to be announced in China, but it only received approval for public release in August, becoming one of the first eight AI chatbots. approved by China.
Unlike many other countries, China prohibits companies from deploying generative artificial intelligence services until they receive approval from Beijing.
Recent data shows that rival domestic artificial intelligence services, notably the chatbot “Kimi” from 12-month-old Alibaba-backed startup Moonshot AI, are quickly catching up with Ernie Bot, despite later being cleared for public release.
Data from AIcpb.com, a site that tracks users’ visits to online artificial intelligence services, shows that Ernie Bot’s app and website were visited a total of 14.9 million times last month.
However, Kimi wasn’t far behind, with a total of 12.6 million visits in the same month.
And Kimi, which received approval to go public in November, has grown much faster, with visits jumping 321.6% in March compared to February, and visits to Ernie Bot up more than 48%, data from AIcpb.com shows.
Globally, Chinese generative AI services still lag far behind their Western counterparts. According to AIcpb.com, OpenAI’s ChatGPT remains the world’s most popular generative AI service, with overall traffic to the product up 9% to reach 1.86 billion views last month.