Baidu Adds 10 New Products to Its AI Stable

Days after unveiling a new chatbot, Baidu has added several new AI products.

As CNBC reported Tuesday (Sept. 5), the Chinese tech giant has debuted 10 artificial intelligence (AI) applications, including a word processing app using the same AI model as “Ernie,” the company announced last week.

According to the report, Baidu says almost 10,000 businesses use Baidu’s Qianfan cloud platform every month. The company also said more than 6 million users have used the AI-powered tool within its cloud product, which CNBC likened to Google Drive.

The company said its AI assistant can search documents, summarize and translate text and produce content.

Baidu launched Ernie last week after the Chinese government gave some tech companies permission to release their AI chatbots to the public.

Before that, Ernie was only offered to a small pool of test users. Now, anyone who has a Chinese phone number can access it for free.

Also getting the greenlight was ByteDance, best known for its social media platform TikTok, which introduced its Doubao AI chatbot to the public.

“The launch of these AI chatbots is significant for ByteDance and Baidu as they aim to enhance their business models and increase advertising revenue,” PYMNTS wrote last week. “Baidu founder and CEO Robin Li stated that the public rollout of Ernie will allow the company to collect real-world human feedback, which will help improve the chatbot at a faster pace.”

China’s new rules for AI, made up of 24 guidelines, went into effect last month and mark the first efforts by a major economy to regulate the AI industry. 

As PYMNTS reported, foreign companies, including those from Europe and the U.S., will need to comply with the guidelines, set by China’s internet watchdog, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), if they hope to do business in the country.

“And with a population of more than a billion, China is an attractive place to do business for tech platforms built explicitly to monetize scalability,” the report said. “Leading Western economies, by contrast, are lagging when it comes to AI regulation — preferring, for now, to take a more hands-off approach to policing the risks of the new technology.”