Men interact with a Baidu AI robot near the company’s logo at its headquarters in Beijing, China, April 23, 2021.
Florence Lo | Reuters
SHENZHEN— Baidu CEO Robin Li said Tuesday that the company’s ChatGPT-like Ernie bot has surpassed 200 million users.
He added that the company will hold another round of its AI development competition and offer a prize of 50 million yuan ($7 million).
Li, who is also co-founder and president of Baidu, gave a keynote speech titled “Everyone is a Developer” at Baidu’s AI Create conference. According to the company, around 5,000 people were present at the event.
Li demonstrated three development tools: AgentBuilder, AppBuilder and ModelBuilder. According to the company, the tools create and integrate AI-powered chatbots with Baidu web search or allow users to build applications without any programming knowledge.
Baidu released its ChatGPT-like Ernie bot more than a year ago and received the green light from Beijing for public use in August.
The chatbot is based on Baidu Ernie’s great language model. Smartphone companies Samsung and Honor have integrated Ernie’s AI capabilities with some mobile devices.
According to Baidu, as of December, approximately 26,000 businesses were actively accessing Ernie’s features on a monthly basis. Ernie handled more than 50 million requests each day, the company said.
“In 2024, we expect the revenue contribution of AI to become more significant, while our core business will remain resilient,” Li said during an earnings call in late February, according to a FactSet transcript.
Baidu will report first-quarter results on May 16.
The global race to develop artificial intelligence capabilities, particularly leveraging the technology’s ability to generate content, has led to an increase in demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units. These chips are critical to providing the computing power needed to run and train large AI language models.
US export controls, announced over the past two years, have limited China’s access to such high-end semiconductors.
Li said in February that Baidu’s reserve of AI chips “enables us to continue to improve Ernie for the next one to two years.”
Earlier this month, Alibaba President Joe Tsai said in an interview with Norges Bank Investment Management that he estimated China was about two years behind the United States in terms of AI development.
Many analysts expect Chinese companies to be able to find an advantage in artificial intelligence on the applications front.
China’s AI market, made up mostly of hardware, followed by software and services, is estimated by Barclays to exceed $26 billion by 2026, up from just under $15 billion last year.
Analysts estimate that China’s spending on “digital transformation” will grow 19.2% between 2023 and 2026, outpacing an expected global increase of 15.6%.
— CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.