Chinese multinational technology company that specializes in Internet-related services, products, and artificial intelligence, Baidu, has announced that its ChatGPT rival Ernie Bot now has more than 100 million users.
The company announced this milestone on Thursday, at a deep-learning summit in Beijing. The news is coming about five months after Ernie Bot was officially launched to the public in August 2023. Before the launch, Baidu‘s Ernie bot ranked first in popularity on Apple’s app store in China after the Chinese tech giant disclosed that it was releasing its ChatGPT-like chatbot to the public.
The company generated $17.9 billion in revenue from its applications during its last fiscal year, after making Ernie Bot generally available in August this year.
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Baidu’s ChatGPT rival Ernie Bot is based on an internally developed large language model called ERNIE. The model supports many of the same use cases such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, which is capable of writing and rewriting text, summarizing existing documents, and generating code.
A few weeks after its launch, Baidu introduced an upgraded version of Ernie Bot powered by a new AI system dubbed Ernie 4.0. The company disclosed that the upgraded chatbot offers drastically improved performance in understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory.
The tech giant also integrated Al features into its existing services. Baidu also debuted a tool that allows users of its cloud-based file storage service to retrievedocuments with natural language prompts.
According to Baidu’s CEO Robin Li, he explicitly stated that the company positioned ERNIE 4.0 as a direct competitor to OpenAl’s ChatGPT, stating that the chatbot is not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4, making it a strong contender in the Al chatbot arena.
Also, Li has on several occasion noted that the company will continuously collect massive valuable, real-world human feedback to improve its chatbot model, and bring more innovation to the Ernie Bot.
Baidu’s focus on enhancing and expanding its AI capabilities with Ernie Bot echoes the tech industry’s broader push towards more sophisticated and integrated artificial intelligence solutions. The company’s rapid development and deployment of Ernie Bot demonstrate the competitive nature of the AI and tech space, where innovation and user-base growth are key indicators of success.
Notably, Baidu has been a frontrunner in China’s efforts to benefit from the excitement surrounding generative Al, which is the technology behind systems like ChatGPT and its successor, GPT-4.
With the World Bank estimating China’s 2023 population to be 1.4 billion people, Ernie Bot’s recent milestone of hitting over 100 million users, represents a significant market penetration, reaching potentially 7% of the people in China.
Chinese tech giant Huawei expects to post a 9% increase in revenue, or $98 billion, in 2023 in a rebound from crippling U.S. sanctions. That’s according to an internal note from Ken Hu, Huawei’s rotating chairman, who said the company is “pretty much back on track.” The Trump administration imposed sanctions on the company in 2019 to curtail Chinese access to state-of-the-art microchips over national security concerns. Sales of the company’s smartphones, which are thought to use its own chips, resumed in August. Shipments jumped more than 80% in October year-over-year, per Counterpoint. (LinkedIn News)