From The Register, February 14:
New ‘Deep Search’ thinking and planning bot to go up against peoples’ champion DeepSeek
Chinese AI continued to march onto the world stage this week, with Alibaba and Baidu both taking major strides.
Let’s start with Baidu, which on Thursday announced its intention to make its Ernie Bot chatbot free, everywhere, from April 1st.
The bot draws on the ERNIE 4.0 model which debuted in 2023 and was launched without details of the corpus used to train it, but the assertion that it can go toe-to-toe with GPT4. Baidu’s since added the ERNIE 4.0 Turbo model, again without offering details. That hasn’t stopped the bot winning over 430 million users, who as of November 2024 pounded it with over 1.5 billion API calls a day.
Baidu currently charges about $8/month to use Ernie Bot.
When the free service commences in April, it will include a new feature called “Deep Search” that Baidu described as offering “enhanced capabilities in thinking, planning, and tool-calling, delivering expert-level content responses across multiple scenarios.”
Why is Baidu going to give away the service? DeepSeek is one answer because the Chinese AI has quickly won many users and its international success has been widely celebrated in China. Baidu billed itself as an AI company for years before LLMs debuted and must be keen to have the Chinese public continue to perceive it as a leader in the field.
Changing tastes is another. The bedrock of Baidu’s business is its search engine and in 2025 AI-assisted search is now a common feature. Making customers cough up for Ernie Bot could be counter productive.
Your correspondent tried to test Ernie Bot but was immediately asked to register to see its output. I visited the general privacy policy Baidu offered me during that interaction and learned that the company collects info including users’ IP address, SSID name, device name, device model, OS version and Mobile Equipment Identity Code IMEI. It also warns that personal information may be processed by third parties. The page also states that privacy policies specific to Baidu products override the general policy, but there’s no link to a policy for Ernie Bot....
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