HANGZHOU, CHINA – NOVEMBER 23: Of us discover about Baidu’s artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot service ERNIE Bot within the future of the 2nd Global Digital Alternate Expo at Hangzhou Worldwide Expo Center on November 23, 2023 in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province of China. (Photo by Wang Gang/China Data Service/VCG by Getty Pictures)
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BEIJING — Chinese tech company Baidu stated Thursday its ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence product, Ernie bot, has surpassed 100 million users.
Baidu shares closed 3% increased in U.S. purchasing and selling, preserving the stock mildly increased for 2023. The company didn’t specify whether the Ernie bot user numbers had been energetic or for a particular time frame.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI stated in November that ChatGPT had about 100 million weekly energetic users. The chatbot is now not truly formally accessible in China, but may per chance presumably also be old within the Chinese language.
Ernie bot, which may per chance presumably also be old in English moreover to its famous language of Chinese, requires a China cellular quantity for user registration. The app is named “Wenxinyiyan” in Mandarin Chinese.
Baidu released its chatbot in March but didn’t discover regulatory popularity of mass rollout unless tedious August, when a few native avid gamers furthermore got the inexperienced light.
TikTok mother or father ByteDance provides a chatbot known as Doubao, which ranked second within the free-to-expend productiveness category in Apple’s app store in China as of Friday morning.
Tencent and Alibaba comprise centered extra on AI merchandise for industry partners, but both offer chatbots to the final public in China. Tencent’s sits internal its widely old WeChat messaging and social media app.
In November, Baidu started charging about $8 a month for its most evolved model of Ernie bot. ChatGPT prices $20 a month to make expend of its most up-to-the-minute accessible model.
— CNBC’s Hayden Field contributed to this file.
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