DeepSeek got Baidu and OpenAI to offer their chatbots for free

Chinese internet giant Baidu has decided to offer its advanced AI chatbots for free. The move comes in response to growing competition from startup DeepSeek, whose models have gained a lot of popularity. Baidu has announced that its chatbot Ernie Bot, which offers premium features like AI image generation, will be available for free to mobile and desktop users from April 1.

The move followed an announcement from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, who revealed the roadmap for the new GPT-5 model on the X platform. ChatGPT users will get unlimited access to the model for free, with fully paying users getting access to a "higher level of intelligence".

$BIDU also announced that it plans to launch a new version of its AI model by the end of June, which will be open source for the first time, similar to all of DeepSeek's models. The new Deep Search feature, which will include enhanced reasoning capabilities and expert-level answers, will also be made available for free in April.

These announcements show the pressure being felt by Baidu and other large companies in the fast-growing AI competition, which has been heavily influenced by the DeepSeek start-up recently. This Chinese startup has stunned the world with its R1 model, which achieves performance comparable to the US giants, but at a much lower price.

When ChatGPT debuted in late 2022, it caused a global sensation and forced Chinese tech giants, including Baidu, to react quickly. Baidu was one of the leading contenders for a domestic alternative to ChatGPT and within four months launched its own model. Even so, Baidu lagged behind competitors like ByteDance with their Doubao in terms of popularity and number of active users.

In recent months, Chinese tech giants like Baidu have lost their leadership in the AI field to new startups like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, which have introduced high-performance, lower-cost models. Moonshot AI, for example, launched its ChatGPT equivalent Kimi late last year, which was the third most visited AI chatbot in China in January.

Another ambitious Chinese AI company is Zhipu AI, which hails from Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University and has strong ties to Tencent and Alibaba. The company has been added to the US Department of Commerce's "Entity List", which accused it of supporting the Chinese military, a charge Zhipu denies.

All the major AI models, including Ernie Bot, ChatGPT and the Claude model by US startup Anthropic, provide basic chatbot functions for free.

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Source: CNN