HONG KONG, April 16 (Reuters) - China's Baidu ( BIDU )

said on Tuesday its artificial intelligence chatbot "Ernie Bot"

has garnered more than 200 million users as it seeks to remain

China's most popular ChatGPT-like chatbot amid increasingly

fierce competition.

The number of users has roughly doubled since the company's

last update in December. The chatbot was released to the public

eight months ago.

Baidu ( BIDU ) CEO Robin Li also said Ernie Bot's application

programming interface (API) is being used 200 million times

everyday, meaning the chatbot was requested by its user to

conduct tasks that many times a day.

The number of enterprise clients for the chatbot reached

85,000, Li said at a conference in Shenzhen.

In February, he told analysts Baidu ( BIDU ) was starting to generate

revenue from Ernie, and in the fourth quarter the company had

earned several hundred million yuan using AI to improve its ad

services and help other companies build their own models.

Last March, Ernie Bot was the first locally developed

ChatGPT-like chatbot to be announced in China, but it only won

approval for public release in August, one of the first eight AI

chatbots that Beijing approved.

Unlike many other countries, China requires companies to

obtain approval before rolling out generative AI services.

Recent data shows that rival domestic AI services,

particularly the "Kimi" chatbot from a 12-month-old,

Alibaba ( BABA )-backed start-up named Moonshot AI, are quickly catching

up with Ernie Bot.

Ernie Bot was visited a total of 14.9 million times across

its app and website last month, while Kimi had a total of 12.6

million visits in the same month, data from AIcpb.com, a site

that tracks user visits to online AI services, showed.

And Kimi was growing much faster, with visits jumping 321.6%

in March from February, while the number of visits to Ernie Bot

grew more than 48%, the data showed.

Globally, Chinese generative AI services still lag far

behind their Western counterparts. According to AIcpb.com,

OpenAI's ChatGPT remains the world's most popular generative AI

service, with total traffic growing 9% to reach 1.86 billion

views last month.

In recent months, China has accelerated approvals for AI

services after highlighting AI as a key area in tech where China

will have to compete with the U.S. Last week, state media

reported 117 large AI models have received approvals so far.