As I reported last week, Baidu became the primary Chinese tech company to roll out its large language model—called Ernie Bot—to most people, following a regulatory approval from the Chinese government. Previously, access required an application or was limited to corporate clients. You possibly can read more in regards to the news here.

I even have to confess the Chinese public has reacted more passionately than I had expected. Based on Baidu, the Ernie Bot mobile app reached 1 million users within the 19 hours following the announcement, and the model responded to greater than 33.42 million user questions in 24 hours, averaging 23,000 questions per minute.

Since then, 4 more Chinese firms—the facial-recognition giant SenseTime and three young startups, Zhipu AI, Baichuan AI, and MiniMax—have also made their LLM chatbot products broadly available. But some more experienced players, like Alibaba and iFlytek, are still waiting for the clearance.

Like many others, I downloaded the Ernie Bot app last week to try it out. I used to be curious to learn how it’s different from its predecessors like ChatGPT. 

What I noticed first was that Ernie Bot does so much more hand-holding. Unlike ChatGPT’s public app or website, which is actually only a chat box, Baidu’s app has so much more features which are designed to onboard and interact latest users. 

Under Ernie Bot’s chat box, there’s an limitless list of prompt suggestions—like “Give you a reputation for a baby” and “Generating a piece report.” There’s one other tab called “Discovery” that displays over 190 pre-selected topics, including gamified challenges (“Persuade the AI boss to lift my salary”) and customised chatting scenarios (“Compliment me”).

It seems to me that a significant challenge for Chinese AI firms is that now, with government approval to confide in the general public, they really want to users and keep them interested. To many individuals, chatbots are a novelty right away. But that novelty will eventually wear off, and the apps must make sure that people produce other reasons to remain.

One clever thing Baidu has done is to incorporate a tab for user-generated content within the app. Locally forum, I can see the questions other users have asked the app, in addition to the text and image responses they got. A few of them are on point and fun, while others are way off base, but I can see how this inspires users to attempt to input prompts themselves and work to enhance the answers.