Chatbots and other generative AI tools are popping out at a faster rate than last year, and it's no longer just the US that's filling the market. China has chatbots of their own, and one or two have already seen hundreds of millions of views.
Baidu's Ernie Bot
Many China-based companies have been developing AI models of their own, one of which already has a functioning ChatGPT-like chatbot called Ernie. It has become the most popular generative AI tool in China attracting over 200 million users.
Baidu CEO Robin Li that the mentioned number is how many times the Ernie Bot's application programming interface is being used every day. That means the chatbot's number of users has almost doubled since the last update in December, as reported by Reuters.
The company is already earning revenue from the AI tool. Baidu claims that in the fourth quarter of 2023, it earned a couple hundred million yuan after using the AI to improve its ad services, as well as build its own models.
It's an impressive achievement, especially considering that the chatbot was only approved in China back in August. In case you are unaware, AI services need to be in the country before it is released for public use, making it harder for AI companies to get off the ground.
Baidu's Ernie is one of the few chatbots that Beijing approved, with only eight of them in the market accessible by the public. It is already the top-used chatbot in China, although a competitor's numbers are already gaining on Ernie's.
Kimi, the chatbot that was developed by the Alibaba-supported Moonshot AI, is already at 12.6 million visits last month, compared to the Ernie Bot which has about 14.9 million visits in the same month, records show.
It appears that Kimi might be able to catch up. Between February to March, the Moonshot AI chatbot saw a 321.5% increase in visits, while the Ernie chatbot only saw 48%. Even with impressive numbers, both still have to reach higher numbers to be level with companies like OpenAI.
The Microsoft-backed AI company reported 1.86 billion views last month, which was a 9% increase from the previous numbers, and that's not including other chatbots that are gaining more users like Google's Gemini or Anthropic's Claude.
Difficult Markets
Even if Baidu intends to expand its chatbot to global use, it might have a hard time competing with the US. For one, its Western competitors have been at this longer and have already been far ahead in the AI race.
Then there's the issue of Chinese chatbots not being able to operate in countries like the US, which holds a large number of potential users. With tensions between the two countries, it's unlikely that a China-based chatbot would be approved in the US.
Considering the kind of things that users enter in chatbots, and AI models' ability to collect data for training, this could be seen as another security risk wherein US user data can be harvested, which is the same issue that has gotten TikTok in hot waters.
