TellWorldAI World Archive
Ask中文
News
Models
Organisations
People
Papers & concepts
Products & agents
Chips & robots
History
Topics
Ask中文

Home›Companies

OrganizationCompany

Baidu

Baidu is a Beijing-based Chinese internet company founded in 2000. It runs China's dominant search engine and develops the ERNIE model family and the ERNIE Bot chatbot.

Founded 2000Website baidu.com Era Statistical learning

2025 · 10 20142026
Events per year
19Models & products26Events3People2Investors & partners

What it is

Baidu, Inc. (百度) is a Chinese internet company headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District. Its best-known product is the search engine that holds a dominant position in China. The company also runs Baidu Maps, Baidu Baike, Baidu Tieba and Baidu Wangpan, and it offers cloud and AI services under the Baidu AI Cloud name.[1]

Origins

Baidu was incorporated on 18 January 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu.[1] Li had created the RankDex link-analysis search algorithm in 1996 and later used that technology for Baidu. He has been the company's chief executive since January 2004.[2]

Baidu listed on Nasdaq on 5 August 2005. In December 2007 it became the first Chinese company included in the Nasdaq-100 index. The company also has a Hong Kong secondary listing dating from March 2021.[1] On 31 August 2026 Baidu announced a dual-primary listing on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, following a voluntary conversion approved at an extraordinary general meeting.[3]

Research and autonomous driving

On 16 May 2014 Andrew Ng was appointed chief scientist to lead Baidu Research.[1] Baidu's autonomous-driving platform, Apollo, launched in April 2017. Its Apollo Go robotaxi service later expanded abroad, including a partnership with Uber in July 2025.[1]

The ERNIE models and ERNIE Bot

Baidu's ERNIE model line began in 2019 as a knowledge-enhanced pre-trained language model, released as open source on the PaddlePaddle deep-learning platform.[4] The chatbot ERNIE Bot, whose Chinese name is 文心一言, launched on 16 March 2023. It opened to the public on 31 August 2023 after regulatory approval. ERNIE 4.0 followed on 17 October 2023.[5]

At Create 2024, held in Shenzhen on 16 April 2024, Baidu said ERNIE Bot had 200 million users and that the ERNIE API handled about 200 million queries a day. The company also introduced ERNIE Speed, ERNIE Lite and ERNIE Tiny, lightweight models distilled from ERNIE, along with the AgentBuilder, AppBuilder and ModelBuilder tools on Baidu AI Cloud.[6]

On 16 March 2025 Baidu released ERNIE 4.5 and the reasoning model ERNIE X1. In June 2025 it open-sourced ten ERNIE 4.5 models and added them to Qianfan, its model-as-a-service platform.[7][8]

Baidu unveiled ERNIE 5.0, which it described as natively omni-modal, at Baidu World on 13 November 2025. It released an updated ERNIE 5.0 in January 2026 and launched ERNIE 5.1 in May 2026.[9][10][11]

By September 2025 the PaddlePaddle-ERNIE ecosystem had served 23.33 million developers and 760,000 enterprises.[12]

Chips and cloud

Kunlunxin, Baidu's chip unit, develops AI accelerators. At Baidu World 2025 Baidu previewed two chips: the Kunlun M100 for inference, expected in early 2026, and the Kunlun M300 for training, expected in 2027.[13][14] In January 2026 Baidu announced a proposed spin-off and separate listing of Kunlunxin.[14]

Business scale

Baidu's 2024 revenue was CN¥133.1 billion, with net income of CN¥24.18 billion.[1][10] AI Cloud Infra revenue was about RMB 20 billion in 2025, up 34% year over year. The ERNIE Assistant had 202 million monthly active users in December 2025.[10]

Where it stands now

At Create 2026, held on 13 May 2026, Robin Li proposed daily active agents as the key industry metric. The agent products Baidu presented at the event included DuMate, the Miaoda coding agent (MeDo internationally) and Famou Agent 2.0.[15]

CapabilitiesLarge language models

TechniquesFoundation models

ApplicationsConsumer apps

Ecosystem & regionChinaCloud

20263

  1. ReleaseBaidu releases the open-weight ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base checkpoint

    On 5 November 2026 Baidu introduced ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, an open-weight 280B-parameter mixture-of-experts pre-training checkpoint published on Hugging Face under Baidu's own license.[^1][^2]

  2. ReleaseBaidu releases ERNIE 5.1

    Baidu released ERNIE 5.1 on 9 May 2026, a model derived from ERNIE 5.0's pre-training with about a third of its total parameters and much lower training cost, after a preview build topped Chinese models on LMArena.

  3. MilestoneKunlunxin starts STAR Market IPO guidance

    In May 2026 Baidu's chip unit Kunlunxin began IPO guidance for China's STAR Market while keeping its Hong Kong plan, as revenue grows and losses narrow toward break-even.

202510

  1. ReleaseBaidu unveils the omni-modal ERNIE 5.0 at Baidu World 2025

    On 13 November 2025 Baidu unveiled ERNIE 5.0 at Baidu World 2025, describing it as a natively omni-modal model. It ranked eighth on the LMArena text leaderboard after leaving preview.[^1][^3]

  2. ReleaseBaidu open-sources ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking

    In November 2025 Baidu released ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking, an open-weight vision-language model that reasons with images — zooming into details and calling image search mid-thought — and reports a ChartQA score above Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-5.

  3. ReleaseBaidu unveils ERNIE X1.1 at WAVE SUMMIT 2025

    On 9 September 2025 Baidu unveiled ERNIE X1.1 at WAVE SUMMIT 2025, claiming gains over ERNIE X1 of 34.8% in factuality and 12.5% in instruction following.[^1][^2]

  4. ReleaseBaidu open-sources ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking

    On 9 September 2025 Baidu open-sourced ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking, a mixture-of-experts reasoning model with 21 billion total and 3 billion active parameters, aimed at logic, mathematics, coding and tool use.

  5. ReleaseBaidu open-sources the ERNIE 4.5 model family under Apache 2.0

    On 30 June 2025 Baidu open-sourced ten ERNIE 4.5 models under the Apache 2.0 license, ranging from 0.3B to 424B parameters, reversing its earlier closed approach.[^1][^2][^3]

  6. ReleaseBaidu launches ERNIE X1 Turbo at half X1's price

    On 25 April 2025 Baidu released ERNIE X1 Turbo, a reasoning model that Baidu said outperforms DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3, priced at a quarter of DeepSeek-R1.[^1]

  7. ReleaseBaidu launches ERNIE 4.5 Turbo with an 80% price cut

    On 25 April 2025 Baidu launched ERNIE 4.5 Turbo, priced 80% below ERNIE 4.5, and announced full support for MCP, a protocol for connecting models to external tools.[^1]

  8. ReleaseBaidu releases ERNIE 4.5, a native multimodal foundation model

    On 16 March 2025 Baidu released ERNIE 4.5, a native multimodal foundation model, together with the reasoning model ERNIE X1, and made ERNIE Bot free to individual users ahead of schedule.

  9. ReleaseBaidu launches ERNIE X1, its first reasoning model

    On 16 March 2025 Baidu launched ERNIE X1, a deep-thinking reasoning model and its first multimodal reasoning model able to use tools. Baidu said it matched DeepSeek-R1 at half the price.[^1]

  10. UpdateBaidu makes ERNIE Bot free ahead of schedule

    On 16 March 2025 Baidu made its ERNIE Bot free for individual users, two weeks ahead of its planned 1 April date, giving free access to the ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1 models.

20242

  1. UpdateBaidu renames the ERNIE Bot app Wenxiaoyan

    On 4 September 2024 Baidu upgraded and renamed its ERNIE Bot app as Wenxiaoyan (文小言), repositioning it as a "new search" assistant that combines search with text, image and multimodal generation.

  2. ReleaseBaidu launches ERNIE 4.0 Turbo as ERNIE Bot reaches 300 million users

    On 28 June 2024 Baidu announced ERNIE 4.0 Turbo, describing it as faster and cheaper than ERNIE 4.0, and said ERNIE Bot had reached 300 million users.

20235

  1. ReleaseBaidu launches ERNIE 4.0 at Baidu World 2023

    On 17 October 2023 Baidu CEO Robin Li unveiled ERNIE 4.0 at Baidu World 2023 in Beijing, claiming it was "not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4" and announcing a paid ERNIE Bot plan built on it.

  2. UpdateERNIE Bot opens to the public after regulatory approval

    On 31 August 2023 Baidu opened its ERNIE Bot chatbot fully to the public through a website and mobile app after Chinese regulatory approval; more than a million users tried it within a day.

  3. PolicyChina publishes the Interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services

    On 13 July 2023 China's Cyberspace Administration published the Interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services, which took effect on 15 August 2023. They apply to generative AI services offered to the public in mainland China.

  4. ReleaseBaidu upgrades ERNIE Bot to ERNIE 3.5

    In late June 2023, Baidu announced ERNIE 3.5, an upgrade to ERNIE Bot that it said beat ChatGPT in overall ability and GPT-4 in some Chinese-language tasks, with higher throughput and a plugin architecture.[^1]

  5. ReleaseBaidu unveils ERNIE Bot, China's first big-tech answer to ChatGPT

    On 16 March 2023 Robin Li unveiled ERNIE Bot, Baidu's chatbot, to invited testers at a Beijing event. Baidu's Hong Kong shares fell as much as 10% that day, and closed down 6.4%.

20212

  1. ReleaseBaidu and Peng Cheng Lab describe the 260-billion-parameter ERNIE 3.0 Titan

    On 23 December 2021, authors from Baidu and Peng Cheng Laboratory posted a paper on ERNIE 3.0 Titan, a 260-billion-parameter Chinese pre-trained model they called the largest of its kind, reporting gains on 68 NLP datasets.

  2. ReleaseBaidu introduces the 10-billion-parameter ERNIE 3.0

    On 5 July 2021 Baidu researchers posted the ERNIE 3.0 paper, describing a 10-billion-parameter model trained on plain text plus a knowledge graph that combines auto-encoding and auto-regressive networks, topping 54 Chinese tasks and SuperGLUE.

20192

  1. ReleaseBaidu releases ERNIE 2.0, beating BERT and XLNet on 16 tasks

    In July 2019 Baidu released ERNIE 2.0, a continual pre-training framework that adds training tasks incrementally and reported beating BERT and XLNet on 16 tasks. The work was published at AAAI 2020.

  2. ReleaseBaidu releases ERNIE, a knowledge-enhanced Chinese language model

    In March 2019 Baidu released ERNIE, a Chinese language model that models entities and phrases directly, and reported that it outperformed Google's BERT on several Chinese language tasks.

20171

  1. ReleaseBaidu launches the Apollo open autonomous driving platform

    In April 2017 Baidu launched Apollo, an open platform giving partners vehicle, hardware and software platforms plus cloud data services, which Baidu hoped would become the Android of the automotive world.

20141

  1. HireAndrew Ng joins Baidu as chief scientist

    On 16 May 2014 US time, Baidu named Andrew Ng, a Stanford professor and co-founder of Coursera, as chief scientist in overall charge of Baidu Research, announced at the opening of its Sunnyvale office and new Silicon Valley AI Lab.

Models and products over time

18
  1. 2019
    • Mar 2019 ERNIE 1.0 Model

      Baidu's first ERNIE pre-trained language model, released in March 2019, added entity- and phrase-level masking to BERT-style pre-training and reported state-of-the-art results on five Chinese NLP tasks.

    • Jul 29, 2019 ERNIE 2.0 Model

      ERNIE 2.0 is Baidu's pre-trained language model framework, published in 2019, which builds pre-training tasks incrementally through continual multi-task learning and reported results above BERT and XLNet on English and Chinese benchmarks.

  2. 2021
    • Jul 5, 2021 ERNIE 3.0 Model

      ERNIE 3.0 is a 10-billion-parameter pre-trained language model from 2021 that trains on plain text plus a large-scale knowledge graph and fuses auto-encoding and auto-regressive networks, so one model handles both language understanding and generation.

    • Dec 23, 2021 ERNIE 3.0 Titan Model

      ERNIE 3.0 Titan is a Chinese pre-trained language model with over 260 billion parameters, described by its authors as the largest dense Chinese model of its time and reported to beat state-of-the-art systems on 68 NLP datasets.

  3. 2023
    • Mar 16, 2023 ERNIE Bot (Wenxin Yiyan / Wenxiaoyan) Product

      ERNIE Bot (文心一言) is Baidu's chatbot, first released to invited testers in March 2023 and opened to the public that August. It has been offered in free and paid tiers and renamed Wenxiaoyan in 2024.

    • Jun 2023 ERNIE 3.5 Model

      ERNIE 3.5 is a Baidu large language model announced in June 2023 as the upgrade behind the ERNIE Bot chatbot, adding a plugin architecture and, according to Baidu, outperforming ChatGPT on several benchmarked abilities.

    • Oct 17, 2023 ERNIE 4.0 Model

      ERNIE 4.0 is Baidu's foundation model unveiled in October 2023, pitched as its most capable model and, in Robin Li's words, "not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4". It anchors Baidu's ERNIE Bot assistant and Qianfan platform.

  4. 2024
    • Jun 2024 ERNIE 4.0 Turbo Model

      ERNIE 4.0 Turbo is a large language model Baidu released in June 2024 as a faster, cheaper upgrade to ERNIE 4.0, sitting between ERNIE 4.0 and ERNIE 4.5 in the company's model line.

  5. 2025
    • Mar 16, 2025 ERNIE 4.5 Model

      ERNIE 4.5 is Baidu's native multimodal foundation model, released on 16 March 2025 and handling text, images, audio and video. In June 2025 Baidu open-sourced ten models from the family under the Apache License 2.0.

    • Mar 16, 2025 ERNIE X1 Model

      ERNIE X1 is Baidu's deep-thinking reasoning model released on 16 March 2025 alongside ERNIE 4.5, notable for tool use, multimodal input and low pricing, and later followed by X1 Turbo and X1.1.

    • Apr 25, 2025 ERNIE 4.5 Turbo Model

      ERNIE 4.5 Turbo is Baidu's multimodal large language model released on 25 April 2025, presented as a faster successor to ERNIE 4.5 with lower hallucination rates and sharply cut API prices.

    • Apr 25, 2025 ERNIE X1 Turbo Model

      ERNIE X1 Turbo is a Baidu reasoning model released on 25 April 2025, positioned as a cheaper and more capable successor to ERNIE X1, with stronger chain-of-thought, multimodal and tool-use abilities.

    • Sep 9, 2025 ERNIE-4.5-21B-A3B-Thinking Model

      A deep-thinking mixture-of-experts model from Baidu with 21 billion total and 3 billion active parameters, a 128K context window and an Apache 2.0 license, open-sourced in September 2025 alongside ERNIE X1.1.

    • Sep 9, 2025 ERNIE X1.1 Model

      ERNIE X1.1 is Baidu's reasoning model unveiled in September 2025, an update to ERNIE X1 that the company reports as stronger in factuality, instruction following and agentic tasks, built on ERNIE 4.5 and released alongside PaddlePaddle v3.2.

    • Nov 2025 ERNIE-4.5-VL-28B-A3B-Thinking Model

      Baidu's open-weight multimodal reasoning model from November 2025: 28B total parameters with 3B active per token, "Thinking with Images" zoom-and-tool reasoning, and Apache 2.0 weights.

    • Nov 13, 2025 ERNIE 5.0 Model

      ERNIE 5.0 is Baidu's natively omni-modal foundation model, unveiled in November 2025 and described as having 2.4 trillion parameters. It is proprietary and was made available to enterprises and consumers in January 2026.

  6. 2026
    • May 9, 2026 ERNIE 5.1 Model

      ERNIE 5.1 is Baidu's large language model released on 9 May 2026, derived from ERNIE 5.0's pre-training at about 6% of the usual pre-training cost, and it placed at the top of Chinese models on LMArena text and search.[^1][^3]

    • Nov 5, 2026 ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base Model

      ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base is Baidu's openly published base checkpoint from November 2026: a text-only sparse mixture-of-experts model with 280B total and 14B activated parameters, released for fine-tuning rather than as a finished assistant.

People3

Robin Li2000–Zhang Yaqin2014–2019Wang Haifeng

Includes1

Baidu Research / Institute of Deep Learning

Invested in1

Kunlunxin

Notes and sources

  1. Baiduhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baidu
  2. Robin Lihttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Li
  3. Baidu Announces Dual-Primary Listing on the Main Board of The Stock Exchange of Hong Kong Limitedhttps://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-announces-dual-primary-listing-on-the-main-board-of-the-stock-exchange-of-hong-kong-limited-302865038.html
  4. Baidu's ERNIE Tops Google's BERT in Chinese NLP Taskshttps://syncedreview.com/2019/03/25/baidus-ernie-tops-googles-bert-in-chinese-nlp-tasks/
  5. Ernie Bothttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernie_Bot
  6. Baidu Presents a Suite of Toolkits and Models to Supercharge AI Creativity at Create 2024https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-presents-a-suite-of-toolkits-and-models-to-supercharge-ai-creativity-at-create-2024-302118130.html
  7. Baidu Unveils ERNIE 4.5 and Reasoning Model ERNIE X1, Makes ERNIE Bot Free Ahead of Schedulehttps://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-unveils-ernie-4-5-and-reasoning-model-ernie-x1--makes-ernie-bot-free-ahead-of-schedule-302402490.html
  8. Baidu Announces Second Quarter 2025 Resultshttps://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-announces-second-quarter-2025-results-302534389.html
  9. Baidu Unveils ERNIE 5.0 and a Series of AI Applications at Baidu World 2025, Ramps Up Global Pushhttps://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-unveils-ernie-5-0-and-a-series-of-ai-applications-at-baidu-world-2025--ramps-up-global-push-302614531.html
  10. Baidu Announces Fourth Quarter and Fiscal Year 2025 Resultshttps://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-announces-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-year-2025-results-302698026.html
  11. Baidu Announces First Quarter 2026 Resultshttps://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-announces-first-quarter-2026-results-302774476.html
  12. Baidu Unveils Reasoning Model ERNIE X1.1 with Upgrades in Key Capabilitieshttps://technode.global/prnasia/baidu-unveils-reasoning-model-ernie-x1-1-with-upgrades-in-key-capabilities/
  13. Baidu presents ERNIE 5.0 and new AI processorshttps://www.gadgety.co.il/?p=353263
  14. Baidu Announces Proposed Spin-off and Separate Listing of Kunlunxinhttps://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-announces-proposed-spin-off-and-separate-listing-of-kunlunxin-302651578.html
  15. Baidu Advances Agent Portfolio to Embrace the Agent Era, Champions Daily Active Agents as Key Metrichttps://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/baidu-advances-agent-portfolio-to-embrace-the-agent-era-champions-daily-active-agents-as-key-metric-302771383.html

Cite this page: Baidu. TellWorld, https://www.tellworld.net/companies/baidu. Updated 2026-11-08