Males work together with a Baidu AI robotic close to the corporate emblem at its headquarters in Beijing, China April 23, 2021.
Florence Lo | Reuters
SHENZHEN — Baidu CEO Robin Li stated Tuesday the corporate’s ChatGPT-like Ernie bot has exceeded 200 million customers.
He added the corporate would maintain one other spherical of its AI improvement competitors, and supply a prize of fifty million yuan ($7 million).
Li, who can also be co-founder and chairman of Baidu, was delivering a gap speech titled “Everyone is a Developer” at Baidu’s AI Create convention. About 5,000 individuals have been in attendance on the occasion, in line with the corporate.
Li demonstrated three improvement instruments—AgentBuilder, AppBuilder, and ModelBuilder. The instruments create and combine AI-powered chatbots with Baidu internet search, or permit customers to create purposes with none coding data, in line with the corporate.
Baidu launched its ChatGPT-like chatbot Ernie bot greater than a 12 months in the past, and acquired the inexperienced gentle from Beijing for public use in August.
The chatbot relies on Baidu’s massive language mannequin Ernie. Smartphone corporations Samsung and Honor have built-in Ernie’s AI capabilities with sure cell units.
As of December, about 26,000 companies have been actively accessing Ernie’s capabilities on a month-to-month foundation, in line with Baidu. Ernie was dealing with greater than 50 million queries on daily basis, the corporate claimed.
“In 2024, we expect AI revenues contribution to become more meaningful, while our core business will remain resilient,” Li stated throughout a late February earnings name, in line with a FactSet transcript.
Baidu is about to launch first-quarter outcomes on Could 16.
The worldwide rush to develop AI capabilities, particularly tapping the tech’s skill to generate content material, has led to a surge in demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing items. These chips are important for offering the computing energy wanted to run and prepare AI massive language fashions.
U.S. export controls, introduced within the final two years, have restricted China’s entry to such high-end semiconductors.
Li stated in February that Baidu’s AI chip reserve “enables us to continue enhancing Ernie for the next one or two years.”
Earlier this month, Alibaba Chairman Joe Tsai stated in an interview with Norges Financial institution Funding Administration that he estimated that China was about two years behind the U.S. in terms of AI development.
Many analysts count on Chinese language corporations will be capable to discover an AI edge on the appliance entrance.
China’s AI market — consisting principally of {hardware}, adopted by software program and companies — is about to exceed $26 billion in measurement by 2026, up from slightly below $15 billion final 12 months, in line with Barclays estimates.
The analysts estimate China’s spending on “digital transformation” will develop by 19.2% between 2023 and 2026, outpacing a projected worldwide improve of 15.6%.
— CNBC’s Michael Bloom contributed to this report.
