Baidu: Ernie chatbot use soared 12-fold in H1

The number of application programming interface calls that Baidu’s Ernie chatbot handled surged by about 12 times in the first half of the year, according to the Chinese tech giant’s founder and chief executive Robin Li.

The artificial intelligence chatbot handled around 200 million API calls a day in April and recently surpassed 600 million or over 1 million tokens generated every day, Li said on Baidu’s second-quarter earnings conference call Thursday.

That compares with 50 million daily API calls in the fourth quarter of last year, yicai.com reported.

Baidu’s Robin Li gives a speech during the 2023 World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province in this Nov. 9, 2023 file photo. China News Service

“The scaling of AI is accelerating at a breakneck pace, reflecting the real value that Ernie creates for people and for businesses alike,” Li said, adding that Beijing-based Baidu is committed to making Ernie increasingly affordable and accessible.

Of Baidu Search’s search result pages, 18% contain AI-generated content, up from 11% in mid-May, he said. “This improvement has led to increased user satisfaction and engagement, as more users are now turning to Baidu Search for more complex queries, increasing Baidu Search versatility.”

Combining intelligent agents with search is an important direction for Baidu to repurpose its search business using large language models (LLMs). Generative AI will provide increasing numbers of users with more accurate direct answers, impacting the traditional advertising model of search engines, according to an industry insider.

“The transformative impact of generative AI and foundation models is becoming more tangible in business and everyday life,” Li pointed out. “Throughout all layers of our AI technology stack and with the rapid adoption of applications built on top of Ernie, we are scaling AI to address real-world problems and generate substantial value both for external customers and our own product portfolio.”

According to the company’s earnings report released Thursday, net profit rose 5% to 5.5 billion yuan (US$770 million) in the second quarter from a year earlier, while revenue remained basically unchanged at 33.9 billion yuan.

“AI Cloud continued to accelerate in the second quarter, offsetting the ongoing macro headwinds for online marketing revenue and resulting in modestly positive topline growth for Baidu Core,” Li’s statement to accompany the report said.

Revenue from Baidu’s AI cloud business jumped 14% to 5.1 billion yuan, increasing its contribution to overall revenue to 9% from 6.9%.

Baidu also said that robotaxi orders jumped 26% to about 899,000 from the same period of last year. Apollo Go, the firm’s driverless service, had provided over 7 million rides across China as of July 28.

“We also achieved new breakthroughs with Apollo Go, which now offers 100% fully driverless ride-hailing services in practically the entire Wuhan, capital of Hubei Province, and has started scalable testing of the latest RT6 vehicles,” Li said.