Wenxiaoyan's Numbers, Read Closely: Baidu's AI Assistant and What It May Do Next

Originally published in Chinese on September 4, 2024. Reading the monthly active users figure What Baidu announced Wenxiaoyan, Baidu's AI assistant app, has passed 10 million monthly active users. Cumulative calls in the second quarter of 2024 reached 2 billion. On August 31, 2023, Baidu opened Ernie Bot to the whole public. Baidu has published its monthly active user figure, so I will do some rough arithmetic. First, a little background. Estimating daily active users from 10 million monthly "Passed 10 million" by the usual way of counting means just over 10 million, or slightly short of it (note 1). I will calculate daily active users from a base of 10 million. I don't know the ratio of daily to monthly actives, so I can't see daily actives in full and can only use common benchmarks. The ratio is usually high for social and gaming products, and some reach 50%. E-commerce does better than most, at around 20%. For tools that are not the user's main entry point, the best ratio is generally about 10%, and 3% to 5% is typical. My blind guess is that daily actives could exceed 500,000. Add the usual tricks for lifting daily activity, use every method available, and the figure might reach 1 million at most. That is the ceiling. When I wrote about Doubao earlier, I pulled some data: Taking 1 million daily actives as the ceiling and using download counts as a rough benchmark to estimate other products' daily actives (not accurate, just one dimension), the other products' numbers may fall far short. Baidu is activating users through a whole product matrix and system working together, so it has more ways to lift activity than a company with a single product.