ChatGPT rival 'Ernie Bot' now has 200 million users, China's Baidu says

China's Baidu has announced that "Ernie Bot", its rival to ChatGPT, has racked up more than 200 million users, roughly double as many as in December. Baidu CEO Robin Li also said Ernie Bot's application programming interface (API) is being used 200 million times every day, meaning the chatbot was requested by its user to conduct tasks that many times a day. The number of enterprise clients for the chatbot reached 85,000, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen on Tuesday. In February, he told analysts that Baidu was starting to generate revenue from Ernie and in the fourth quarter, the company had earned several hundred million yuan using AI to improve its advertising services and help other companies build their own models. Last March, Ernie Bot was the first locally developed ChatGPT-like chatbot to be announced in China but it only won approval for public release in August, becoming one of the first eight AI chatbots Beijing authorised.