Chinese AI marches on as Baidu makes its chatbot free, Alibaba scores Apple deal

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.

Make of that what you will if you decide Ernie Bot is worth using!

Now on to Alibaba, whose co-founder Jim Tsai this week appeared at an event in Dubai called the “World Government Summit”. Tsai participated in a fireside chat during which he claimed Apple has chosen Alibaba’s AI to power the Apple Intelligence service on its hardware in China.

The Middle Kingdom is touchy about citizens’ data going offshore, so Apple was probably not able to use OpenAI tech as it does elsewhere. Cupertino also uses its own on-device models to power its AI services.

Alibaba’s stock price has surged on the news. Investors may also be pleased that co-founder Jack Ma was recently seen in company offices. In 2020 Ma criticized some of Beijing’s policies and shortly afterwards dropped out of public view. It’s thought China’s government made it plain further commentary could be dangerous. And while China likes to celebrate the success of its entrepreneurs, the Communist Party doesn’t like it when figures outside it develop mass followings.

For now, Alibaba seems to be back in the good graces of investors, Beijing, and Apple. ®