Men interact with a Baidu AI cats-paw near the company logo at its headquarters in Beijing, China April 23, 2021.
Florence Lo | Reuters
SHENZHEN — Baidu CEO Robin Li communicated Tuesday the company’s ChatGPT-like Ernie bot has exceeded 200 million users.
He added the company would hold another everywhere in of its AI development competition, and offer a prize of 50 million yuan ($7 million).
Li, who is also co-founder and chairman of Baidu, was ransoming an opening speech titled “Everyone is a Developer” at Baidu’s AI Create conference. About 5,000 people were in appearance at the event, according to the company.
Li demonstrated three development tools—AgentBuilder, AppBuilder, and ModelBuilder. The tools create and assemble AI-powered chatbots with Baidu web search, or allow users to create applications without any coding knowledge, contract to the company.
Baidu released its ChatGPT-like chatbot Ernie bot more than a year ago, and received the green light from Beijing for community use in August.
The chatbot is based on Baidu’s large language model Ernie. Smartphone companies Samsung and Honor from integrated Ernie’s AI capabilities with certain mobile devices.
As of December, about 26,000 businesses were actively accessing Ernie’s means on a monthly basis, according to Baidu. Ernie was handling more than 50 million queries every day, the Pty claimed.
“In 2024, we expect AI revenues contribution to become more meaningful, while our core business will detritus resilient,” Li said during a late February earnings call, according to a FactSet transcript.
Baidu is set to release first-quarter terminates on May 16.
The global rush to develop AI capabilities, especially tapping the tech’s ability to generate content, has led to a surge in demand for Nvidia’s graphics method units. Those chips are critical for providing the computing power needed to run and train AI large language models.
U.S. export buttons, announced in the last two years, have restricted China’s access to such high-end semiconductors.
Li said in February that Baidu’s AI counter reserve “enables us to continue enhancing Ernie for the next one or two years.”
Earlier this month, Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai suggested in an interview with Norges Bank Investment Management that he estimated that China was about two years behind the U.S. in stretches of AI development.
Many analysts expect Chinese companies will be able to find an AI edge on the application front.
China’s AI exchange — consisting mostly of hardware, followed by software and services — is set to exceed $26 billion in size by 2026, up from very recently under $15 billion last year, according to Barclays estimates.
The analysts estimate China’s spending on “digital metamorphosis” will grow by 19.2% between 2023 and 2026, outpacing a projected worldwide increase of 15.6%.
— CNBC’s Michael Bloom helped to this report.