Adult males interact with a Baidu AI robot in close proximity to the organization emblem at its headquarters in Beijing, China April 23, 2021.
Florence Lo | Reuters
SHENZHEN — Baidu CEO Robin Li reported Tuesday the firm’s ChatGPT-like Ernie bot has exceeded 200 million buyers.
He added the firm would keep an additional spherical of its AI progress competitors, and offer you a prize of 50 million yuan ($7 million).
Li, who is also co-founder and chairman of Baidu, was offering an opening speech titled “Anyone is a Developer” at Baidu’s AI Develop meeting. About 5,000 people today had been in attendance at the event, according to the firm.
Li shown a few growth tools—AgentBuilder, AppBuilder, and ModelBuilder. The tools generate and integrate AI-powered chatbots with Baidu world-wide-web lookup, or let end users to produce applications with out any coding awareness, in accordance to the corporation.
Baidu produced its ChatGPT-like chatbot Ernie bot additional than a 12 months ago, and acquired the environmentally friendly light-weight from Beijing for general public use in August.
The chatbot is primarily based on Baidu’s huge language model Ernie. Smartphone corporations Samsung and Honor have built-in Ernie’s AI capabilities with certain cellular units.
As of December, about 26,000 companies were actively accessing Ernie’s abilities on a month to month foundation, according to Baidu. Ernie was managing additional than 50 million queries every day, the firm claimed.
“In 2024, we expect AI revenues contribution to develop into extra significant, even though our main business will stay resilient,” Li mentioned through a late February earnings phone, in accordance to a FactSet transcript.
Baidu is established to release very first-quarter benefits on May 16.
The worldwide rush to produce AI abilities, specially tapping the tech’s capability to deliver material, has led to a surge in demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units. All those chips are critical for offering the computing power desired to run and train AI big language styles.
U.S. export controls, introduced in the very last two a long time, have restricted China’s entry to these significant-finish semiconductors.
Li stated in February that Baidu’s AI chip reserve “enables us to go on maximizing Ernie for the up coming just one or two yrs.”
Earlier this thirty day period, Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai said in an job interview with Norges Bank Investment decision Administration that he estimated that China was about two a long time driving the U.S. in terms of AI development.
Lots of analysts anticipate Chinese companies will be equipped to uncover an AI edge on the software entrance.
China’s AI industry — consisting typically of hardware, followed by application and companies — is set to exceed $26 billion in dimensions by 2026, up from just under $15 billion past yr, according to Barclays estimates.
The analysts estimate China’s paying on “electronic transformation” will expand by 19.2% concerning 2023 and 2026, outpacing a projected around the world boost of 15.6%.
— CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
