Baidu Offers Its AI Chatbot for Free

Chinese tech giant Baidu, a leader in search engines, announced on Thursday that it will make its AI-powered chatbot, Ernie Bot, available for free starting April 1. The decision is attributed to improved technology and lower costs, according to Reuters.

In a WeChat post, Baidu stated that its AI service will be freely available to all users on both desktop and mobile devices.

• ChatGPT Back Online After Brief Outage

• VALL-E: After ChatGPT, here’s a new artificial intelligence capable of reproducing your voice by listening to it for 3 seconds

Baidu is facing increasing competition in the AI sector in China, particularly from DeepSeek, a company that also offers an AI-powered chatbot for free. The startup claims that its performance rivals advanced systems from OpenAI, the US-based industry leader, while maintaining lower operational costs.

• Britain criminalizes the use of artificial intelligence for child sexual exploitation

• New iPhone Features Coming in Early 2025… Discover Them!

Baidu was one of the first Chinese companies to enter the AI field following OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in 2022. However, it has struggled to achieve widespread adoption of its Ernie language model.

The company states that the capabilities of its latest version, Ernie 4.0, are comparable to those of ChatGPT-4.

• Italy Bans “DeepSeek”: The First Country to Impose a Ban

• Disappointing: 4 Reasons Behind Apple’s AI Struggles

• Satellite Internet: Remote Areas Go “Online”