ERNIE Bot opens to the public after regulatory approval

Background

Conversational AI services — chatbots that answer questions, draft text and explain ideas in ordinary language — are built on large language models (LLMs). A language model is trained on very large amounts of text and learns, in effect, to predict what tends to come next; asked a question, it produces an answer one small piece of text at a time. Such a system can run in a lab or be handed to a small group of testers long before anyone with a phone can use it.

In China, that last step acquired a gate in 2023. From 15 August 2023, Chinese companies needed approval before releasing generative AI services to the public, and Baidu was among the first to receive it ^[2]. Arrangements of this kind work by requiring the provider to have a service reviewed before launch, so the date a product becomes publicly available depends on clearance as much as on engineering.

What happened

On 31 August 2023, Baidu opened ERNIE Bot fully to the public through its website and mobile app, after receiving regulatory approval ^[1][2]. At the time the service was focused on the Chinese market ^[2].

For a chatbot, opening to the public is a distribution step as much as a technical one. Before that point, the question is whether a model can produce a decent answer in a demonstration; afterwards, it is whether the service can hold up when anyone can arrive at once, on the web and on a phone.

The first 24 hours

The service opened at midnight, and more than a million users tried it in less than 24 hours ^[3]. According to Baidu, users put more than 33.42 million questions to ERNIE Bot in the first day ^[4]. The two figures describe the same day from different angles: many people arrived, and they asked a great many questions.

On opening, Robin Li said Baidu would draw on feedback from hundreds of millions of netizens ^[1]. Feedback of that kind is a practical input for consumer chatbots: which questions people actually ask, which answers they rate poorly or correct, where the model misunderstands — signals that only exist once a service is genuinely public and the volume of conversation is large.

Afterwards

In December 2023, Baidu said ERNIE Bot had passed 100 million users ^[5]. The step from a million users on the first day to a hundred million within a few months was measured by the company's own numbers; it is a milestone reported by Baidu rather than an independently audited count.

Why it matters

The significance of the episode is less a single launch than a sequence that worked end to end: approval first, then full public availability, then a first day at the million-user scale, and then a hundred-million-user claim a few months later ^[2][3][5]. For the Chinese generative AI industry it supplied a template. Public availability was not a default state but something that had to be granted, and a launch also had to be carried by engineering that could absorb real traffic. Because ERNIE Bot was focused on the Chinese market when it opened ^[2], those numbers describe an audience that was overwhelmingly domestic.