Playing Catchup
Despite the controversy, DeepSeek still hit number one in both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store in January.
Baidu is facing strong competition from Alibaba as well, whose stocks surged upon the launch of its QwQ-32B, which is free to download and use, even commercially. However, it was DeepSeek and OpenAI that Alibaba waved its gauntlet at and not Baidu, giving a strong sense of where the ecommerce giant sees its greatest competition.
Baidu, however, is pushing hard. It made grand claims for its Ernie bot in April last year, saying that it had exceeded 200 million users. The company also relaunched its AI development competition, offering a prize of 50 million yuan ($7 million). There are rumors that an Ernie 5 model is imminent.
