Baidu launches ERNIE 4.0 Turbo as ERNIE Bot reaches 300 million users

Background

ERNIE Bot is Baidu's AI chatbot built on the company's ERNIE model family. By the end of 2023 the chatbot had reached 100 million users, according to SiliconANGLE ^[4]. Growth continued into 2024: at its Create 2024 event, held two months before the Turbo launch, Baidu reported 200 million ERNIE Bot users and about 200 million ERNIE API calls a day ^[3].

Cost was moving in the other direction. In a release datelined 16 April 2024, Baidu said ERNIE inference cost had been reduced to 1% of the March 2023 version ^[3]. Inference here means the computing spent each time a finished model answers a request, as opposed to the much larger one-off cost of training it; it is the part of the bill that scales with how often a model is actually used.

The announcement

On 28 June 2024 Baidu announced ERNIE 4.0 Turbo and said ERNIE Bot had 300 million users ^[1][4]. The new version was presented as an update to ERNIE 4.0 rather than a new generation of the model.

What the new version changed

Baidu said ERNIE 4.0 Turbo was faster and cheaper than ERNIE 4.0, with stronger capabilities for common use cases ^[2][4]. The emphasis was on speed, price and everyday tasks rather than on a new list of abilities.

The developer side was part of the message as well: the PaddlePaddle and ERNIE developer community reached 14.7 million in June 2024 ^[2]. PaddlePaddle is Baidu's open-source deep learning framework, so this figure counts people building on Baidu's training tools and models together, not only people using the chatbot.

The launch also entered the company's financial reporting. Baidu's second-quarter 2024 results release listed the ERNIE 4.0 Turbo launch among its corporate highlights ^[2].

Why the numbers matter

Three public user figures sit close together: 100 million at the end of 2023 ^[4], 200 million at Create 2024 in April 2024 ^[3], and 300 million at the Turbo launch in June 2024 ^[1]. Read as a sequence, they describe a steep curve over roughly six months.

The cost figures point the same way. Baidu said inference cost had fallen to 1% of the March 2023 version ^[3], and described 4.0 Turbo as cheaper than 4.0 ^[2][4]. Price per answer decides whether a model can sit inside products that are called millions of times a day; a version that is both faster and cheaper is aimed at that kind of volume rather than at benchmark records.

The API figure reported in April, about 200 million calls a day ^[3], measures something different from the user count: it counts programmatic calls to the model's interface, including calls made by other companies' products rather than by people typing into a chat window. Putting the two kinds of number side by side gives a rough sense of how much use happens outside Baidu's own app.

The suffix in the name is worth noting. In model naming, additions like "Turbo" usually signal work on speed and cost within the same generation rather than a jump in capability, and Baidu's own description of ERNIE 4.0 Turbo is confined to being faster, cheaper and stronger on common use cases ^[2][4]. The release is therefore best read as an efficiency update to ERNIE 4.0, announced at the moment the chatbot's user count was publicly put at 300 million ^[1][4], with a developer community of 14.7 million behind it ^[2].