August 24, 2023: On Thursday, China’s Baidu states earnings increased, exceeding anticipations.

This was the quickest quarterly by-every-year growth speed in two years. Baidu’s U.S.-traded shares were up by over 4% in pre-market trading.

Within Baidu’s core businesses, online marketing revenue increased by 15% to 19.6 billion yuan in the second quarter, and non-online marketing revenue added 12% to 6.8 billion yuan.

The company’s usage of AI to better check ads to Baidu search queries helped boost the quarter’s online marketing sales growth from a year ago, Robin Li, co-founder and CEO of Baidu, stated in a returns call.

Baidu operates China’s primary internet search engine and commonly used consumer apps for navigation and cloud document storage.

“In the second quarter of 2023, Baidu Core accelerated revenue and profit growth, driven by the solid version of online marketing business and operating leverage,” Li said in a release.

“Generative AI and large vocabulary models hold immense transformative power in numerous initiatives, presenting a significant market opportunity for us,” he stated.

Baidu has been progressing with a Chinese-language ChatGPT alternative called Ernie bot, which is open to the public and launched in March. OpenAI’s wildly popular competitor chatbot isn’t easily accessible in the country.

Last week, Baidu announced that five Ernie bot plugins, including ones for quickly converting text to video and for PDF search, would become more widely available to users. According to the company, three of the plugins can also be used simultaneously.

Li said the company plans to add plugins from third-party developers on the earnings call.

Baidu has prioritized corporate members for access to its Ernie bot, which opened to wider use via a waitlist earlier this year.