Baidu’s AI chatbot ‘Ernie Bot’ has drawn 200 million users

China’s Baidu said on Tuesday that its AI chatbot “Ernie Bot” has more than 200 million users. It is trying to stay China’s most popular ChatGPT-like chatbot in a market where competition is getting tougher.

Since December, when the company last released new information, the number of users has almost doubled. People have been able to use the chatbot for eight months now.

Baidu CEO Robin Li also said that Ernie Bot’s API is used 200 million times every day. This means that users ask the chatbot to do chores that many times every day. Li told people at a meeting in Shenzhen that the chatbot had 85,000 business clients.

He told analysts in February that Baidu was starting to make money from Ernie. With AI, the company had made a lot of money by the fourth quarter. It used AI to improve its ad services and help other companies build their own models.

Ernie Bot was the first locally created ChatGPT-like chatbot to be announced in China in March, but it wasn’t available to the public until August. It was one of the first eight AI chatbots that Beijing approved.

In China, unlike many other countries, businesses need to get permission before they can offer creative AI services.

New data shows that other AI services in China, especially the “Kimi” robot from Moonshot AI, a 12-month-old start-up backed by Alibaba, are quickly catching up to Ernie Bot.

AIcpb.com, a website that keeps track of user visits to online AI services, showed that Ernie Bot’s app and website were each visited 14.9 million times last month. Kimi, on the other hand, was visited 12.6 million times in the same month and Kimi was growing much faster. The number of visits to Kimi jumped 321.6% from February to March, while the number of trips to Ernie Bot grew by more than 48%.

Chinese generative AI services are still a long way behind their Western counterparts on a global scale. AIcpb.com says that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is still the most popular generative AI service in the world. Last month, it got 1.86 billion views, which is a 9% increase from the month before.

China has been pushing faster approvals for AI services since it became clear that AI is a key area of tech where China will have to fight with the U.S. State media said last week that 117 big AI models have been approved so far.