Deepseek forces AI giants like Baidu and Openaai to offer free chatbots
Deepseek forces AI giants like Baidu and Openaai to offer free chatbots
The Chinese internet giant Baidu will offer its advanced AI Chatbot services free of charge. This happens against the background of an increasing competition among global developers, which is heated by the growing popularity of the models of the start-up Deepseek.
Baidu’s Ernie offered free of charge from April
The Ernie offered, the AI Chatbot of the company based in Beijing, with powerful functions such as AI painting, will be available free of charge from April 1 for both mobile and desktop users. This announcement was published on Thursday on Wechat.
competition on the AI market
new version of the Ernie offered
On Friday, Baidu announced in another post that the next generation of his Ernie offered, version 4.5, should come onto the market by the end of June. For the first time, this edition of the chatbot open source will be, just like all models from Deepseek. In addition, the Deep Search function of Ernie, which offers improved thinking skills and expert responses, will also be available free of charge from April.
The pressure in the AI race
These successive announcements illustrate the pressure that Baidu and other companies are exposed to in the intensive AI race in China, especially after Deepseek's recent publication. The latest R1 AI model of the Chinese start-up caused a sensation worldwide, since it offered a comparable performance like the US industry giants at a significantly lower price.
share price and market development
The Baidu stocks listed on the Stock Exchange in Hong Kong rose by up to 12 % on Thursday and were traded on Friday at around $ 95 ($ 12.20) per share. Baidu is part of the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index, which has risen by 20 % since January.
The relevance of Chatgpt in China
The highly expected entry of Chatgpt at the end of 2022 captivated the global audience within a very short time and brought Chinese technology groups to search for local alternatives. Baidu was one of the leading competitors in the Chinese AI sector and published his answer to Chatgpt within four months, even in front of other established tech giants such as Tencent and Alibaba.
new challengers
Nevertheless, Baidu has fallen behind competitors such as Bytedances Doubao in terms of popularity and active users. Alibaba announced that Apple decided to work with them to introduce his AI functions in China after several Chinese AI companies, including Baidu, have been checked.
start-ups
In the past few months, China's established technologists have lost the AI stage to aspiring start-ups such as Deepseek and Moonsshot Ai, the models that deliver high-quality results. Moonshot Ai launched a counterpart to Chatgpt at the end of last year and was the third-party Ai-Chatbot platform in China, after Deepseek and Doubao in January 2023, according to Aircpb.com, an AI product tracker.
A look at other promising AI companies
One of the promising Chinese AI companies is ZHIPU AI, a start-up that was founded at the renowned Tsinghua University in Beijing. ZHIPU has strong connections to the government and is supported by Tencent and Alibaba. The US Ministry of Trade added ZHIPU to the "Entity List" last month and accused the company of supporting Chinese military technology, which it rejected.
price model and user base
Most big AI chat bot models-including Ernie Bot, Openais Chatgpt and the American start-up Anthropic with Claude-offer their basic services free of charge. Chatgpt started without fees before offering a premium version. In 2023, Baidu introduced paid premium functions for his AI service, including a text-to-image generator, and demanded up to 59.90 yuan ($ 8.20) per month. According to Baidu, Ernie Bot won 430 million users by November 2024.