(Yicai) April 16 -- Ernie bot, Baidu’s answer to ChatGPT, now has 200 million users, according to the Chinese tech giant.

The figure shows that the large language model is effectively meeting the needs of users for work, life, and learning, Chief Technology Officer Wang Haifeng said today at the Baidu AI Developer Conference in Shenzhen.

Wang attributed its success to Baidu's comprehensive layout in chips, frameworks, models, and applications, especially the joint optimization of Ernie Bot with the firm’s deep-learning artificial intelligence platform PaddlePaddle.

Ernie Bot’s average weekly training efficiency has reached 98.8 percent, up 5.1 times from March last year, when the chatbot was released.

Ernie Bot was China’s first locally developed AI chatbot and it became fully available to the general public following government approval in August. Four other Chinese tech firms, including SenseTime Group and Zhipu AI, were also cleared to make their chatbots available to the public at that time.

The PaddlePaddle-Ernie Bot ecosystem has so far attracted 12.95 million developers, serves 244,000 businesses and organizations, and has created 895,000 models based on PaddlePaddle and Ernie Bot.

Ernie Bot has learned both natural language and coding capabilities from training data numbering in the trillions. On the basis of these abilities, Baidu has developed new products, called Code Agent and Comate. 

“Agent enables everyone to do things that only programmers could do before, and now everyone can become a programmer, while Comate helps professional programmers compose better code faster, which can be seen as programmers’ AI support,” Wang said.

Wang also revealed the progress of Baidu’s AI talent plan. In 2020, the company proposed cultivating five million AI specialists in the next five years and this goal has been achieved ahead of schedule.

Editor: Tom Litting