Baidu to Offer Ernie Chatbot For Free Amid DeepSeek Challenge

In a sign of how DeepSeek’s launch could fundamentally change the artificial intelligence industry, China’s biggest search engine Baidu has announced it is granting free-of-charge access to its generative AI chatbot Ernie.

Ernie Bot will be accessible at no cost to all users on both desktop and mobile platforms starting April 1, Baidu said in a WeChat post on Thursday.

It cited improved technology and reduced costs as the impetus for its move.

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Baidu was among China’s first movers in AI following the 2022 debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Up until the launch of DeepSeek last month, Ernie Bot was widely seen as the closest Chinese rival to ChatGPT.

The company has previously said the platform’s latest version, Ernie 4.0, matches OpenAI’s GPT-4 capabilities.

But Baidu’s biggest challenge has been gaining widespread adoption for its Ernie large language model (LLM), despite the GenAI chatbot handling 1.5 billion daily user queries and interactions.

According to data from AI product tracker Aicpb.com, in terms of user adoption Baidu’s AI offerings have lagged those of domestic competitors such as ByteDance’s Doubao chatbot and newcomer DeepSeek.

Baidu’s struggles are indicative of the rapidly growing competition in China’s AI sector. Last year, the industry witnessed an intense price war as Baidu and its close competitors Alibaba and ByteDance slashed prices of LLMs used to power generative artificial intelligence products.

At the time, Baidu made its Ernie Speed and Ernie Lite models free to use for all business users.

The company revealed in November last year that it was now shifting focus to the commercialisation of LLM applications. One of its products — I-RAG — is a text-to-image technology that leverages Baidu’s search capabilities to address the AI “hallucination” issue.

Baidu also introduced Miaoda, which utilises its LLM capabilities to generate code, allowing users to develop software applications without extensive coding expertise.

Early this week, CNBC reported that Baidu was also planning to launch the next iteration Ernie Bot in the second half of 2025.

The new model, Ernie 5, will feature multimodal capabilities enabling it to process and convert between different formats including text, video, images and audio, CNBC reported, citing a source familiar with the matter.

• Reuters, with additional editing and inputs from Vishakha Saxena

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