open-source from June 30. The launch of the open-source model leads to a major shift in strategy as competition heats up.
Robin Li, the CEO of Baidu had advocated for closed models as being the only viable path for the development of artificial intelligence. Yet, with the emergence of DeepSeek has upended the sector. The startup is offering AI services and it states that are comparable in performance to the U.S.
In its tries to increase market share, Baidu also announced that is going to make its AI chatbot named Ernie Bot free on April 1. This change comes only a year and a half after the premium versions were introduced.
Yet, the large language model, Ernie, has struggled to get widespread adoption in multiple places. Even more so, Baidu has stated that its current version also matches OpenAI’s GPT-4 capabilities.
It is also worth mentioning that in China, Byte Dance's Doubao chatbot has the most active monthly users, summing up to 78,6 million. On the other hand, DeepSeek has 33,7 million users, while Ernie Bot has 13 million users according to data from AI product tracker Aicpb.com.
Baidu also stated in a WeChat post “We will gradually launch the Ernie 4.5 series in the coming months and officially open-source it from June 30,”, he also added, “If you open things up, a lot of people will be curious enough to try it. This will help spread the technology much faster,", reported Reuters.
