Baidu says its version of ChatGPT has reached more than 100m users

ChatGPT who? Baidu’s chatbot—known as Ernie Bot (文心一言)—has just surpassed 100 million users, according to CTO Haifeng Wang.

Wang made the announcement in late December in Beijing at the company’s Wave Summit—a convention highlighting deep learning and development updates.

Ernie (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration)—whose public launch received China’s stamp of approval last August—responds to voice prompts, photos, and text-based inputs. What’s unique about the chatbot, though, are the subcategories within the app that offer a more visual and niche experience. With a few taps, users can ask the bot to write a script for Chinese streaming video platform Bilibili, or create an outline for a PowerPoint presentation. There’s even a category for users to create mouthwatering food service reviews—because writing reviews yourself is so last year.

The great firewall. Last year, ChatGPT and all its services made the blacklist in China, which claimed it could be used to spread American propaganda or “false information,” an argument China has also used when implementing and defending bans on the vast majority of US-based platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

But the Chinese chatbot isn’t exempt from circulating fake news. While Ernie offers logical answers for simple math equations and questions like, “Why is the sky blue?”, the bot has been known to parrot false information, previously stating that the origins of Covid-19 came from American vape users in 2019. As of today, Ernie’s answer to the Covid question is accurate—the bot states that the earliest case was transmitted in Wuhan, China.

Zooming out. Baidu—founded in 2000—has shown a significant interest in AI and claims to be one of the few companies in the world to offer a full AI stack, with infrastructure consisting of AI chips, a deep learning framework, natural language processing, speech recognition, AR, and more. The super-unicorn is also home to a venture capital arm that manages around $500 million across three funds, according to Crunchbase.

Besides Baidu, other tech companies in China, like TikTok parent ByteDance, have been eager to jump into the AI scene. ByteDance launched Doubao last August—though the company came under fire after The Verge reported it had secretly used OpenAI’s tech to develop its large language model. OpenAI responded by suspending ByteDance’s account.