Ernie Bot, from China's largest Internet company Baidu, has generated more than 100 million users since its official launch in August, according to Haifeng Wang, Baidu's chief technology officer. Wang announced the victory at the Deep Learning Summit in Beijing today, according to a Reuters report.
Baidu's search engine commands more than 76 percent of China's Internet market share, with the number of Internet users exceeding 705 million this year.
During the Baidu World event, company founder Robin Lee introduced Ernie 4.0, which he said is an advanced version of its predecessors, especially Ernie 3.5. As previously reported by Decrypt , Lee said the company's new model is “our most powerful model to date, featuring comprehensive improvements to its core capabilities, perception, generation, thinking and memory.”
Li compared it with OpenAI's GPT-4 model and said Ernie 4.0 is the best performing Chinese LLM based on SUPERGLUE benchmarks. Ernie Bot is part of Baidu's broader strategy to integrate advanced AI into various Internet services.
As the World Bank estimates that China's population will reach 1.4 billion by 2023, Ernie Bot's 100 million users represent a potential market penetration of 7% of China's population. However, it's important to note Ernie Bot's regional focus, as far as decryption goes – it requires a Chinese phone number to register. If so, this indicates a more localized approach compared to the globally accessible ChatGPT.
ChatGPIT reached 100 million users two months after its launch, much faster than Baidu—which had Ernie Bot available in closed testing for a few months before launching in early August.
Baidu did not respond to requests for comment from Decrypt, which could not independently verify the claims.
Baidu's focus on developing and expanding its AI capabilities with Ernie Bot echoes the tech industry's broader push toward sophisticated and integrated artificial intelligence solutions. The company's rapid growth and deployment of the Ernie bot demonstrates the competitiveness of the AI and technology space.
As AI continues to be a field of intense development and competition, Baidu's achievements with Ernie Bot are a major contribution to the field, especially given that local Chinese dialects and even Mandarin (the official language of China) require extensive training in syntactic structure, making it difficult to easily adapt the model used for Western languages.
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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