China is a sleeping giant of AI and has many companies competing with each other

It seems that US companies and startups are the great competitors of the AI ​​segment, but Chinese companies are demonstrating that rivalry is also formidable. He Deepseek impact Of course it has been noticed especially there. And if not, tell Baidu.

Ernie was closed and paid. Considered “La Google China”, Baidu was one of the first to launch its own chatbot. Ernie launched In March 2023 and in September I was already available to All audiences. However, the company’s approach was always clear: his generative chatbot was closed, and was paid.

But it will soon be free. This week those responsible for Baidu have announced two important changes in their strategy. To start, Baidu will have a free version As of April 1which will allow access to the company’s LLMs. The company had been trying to monetize the service for 17 months, which in China had a monthly price of 49.90 yuan (6.56 euros).

And besides, Open Source. But it is also that the company has confirmed that the next generation of its LLM Ernie will use an Open Source license on June 30. It is a turn of the events, because as we have commented from the beginning Baidu adopted a model and license owned for its chatbot. Even Openai seems consider a similar movement.

Deepseek changes everything. The reason for these strategy changes is probably due to what has happened with Deepseekthe Chinese startup that launched Deepseek v3 in November and After Deepseek R1 In January. These models were not only free, they were also Open Source, which triggered their popularity by demonstrating that they were really competitive even when comparing them with the best LLM of their competitors in the United States. There, by the way, Depseek’s impact has also been formidable: several of those US rivals have already offered their reasoning models free of charge.

Fierce competition in China. Baidu’s decision shows how in China there is also a particular war to lead in AI. Alibaba, without going any further, has just presented The promising Qwen2.5-Maxand Bytedance, who does not conform to Tiktok, is beginning to become a surprising power in the. Other companies such as Tencent or Startups such as MoNshot and O1.AI They are also in that fight, however much their models have to be very socialists.

The important thing is that they use you. Baidu seems to recognize that in this battle one of the keys is to achieve some popularity. According to Reuters The most successful chatbot in China is currently Doubao (Bytedance) with 78.6 million monthly users. Deepseek is the second with 33.7 million while Ernie has only 13 million.

Ernie 4.5 will arrive soon, but what about the reasoning? In Baidu they currently have ERNIE 4.0, which competes with GPT-4, but will soon launch Ernie 4.5, which will be precisely the one that adopts that license Open Source. What does not seem to have a model of reasoning as Deepseek R1, something surprising again considering that Baidu is a giant with many more resources. One that yes, will surely be moving card so as not to let this juicy market escape.

Image | Baidu

In Xataka | Deepseek has given the starting gun in the race for a cheaper AI. And China starts with advantage