Baidu

Tencent Music Entertainment (TME) briefly surpassed Baidu in market capitalization, highlighting a market re-evaluation. Investors favor TME’s proven “copyright-to-subscribers-to-revenue” model over Baidu’s AI investments, which await clearer commercial returns. This shift signals changing internet traffic dynamics and investment logic, with TME evolving into a dedicated content provider.

Baidu founder Robin Li announced a leadership shake-up, appointing He Haijian as the new CFO and Jackson He to head HR and Administration. Cui Shanshan will focus on her role as Secretary-General of the Culture Committee. He Haijian brings extensive financial experience from Kingsoft Cloud and major financial institutions.

Baidu has open-sourced its ERNIE 4.5 AI models, featuring multi-modal Mixture-of-Experts with enhanced orthogonality. Modong Space, China’s national computing platform, is the first to integrate these advanced models. ERNIE 4.5 optimizes training and inference for improved text generation, image comprehension, and multi-modal reasoning, catering to diverse real-world applications.

Baidu has released its ERNIE 4.5 open-source large language model series, featuring ten models including Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) variants. These models offer fully open-sourced pre-training weights and inference code, accessible via platforms like Hugging Face. The series boasts innovative heterogeneous MoE architecture for multimodal capabilities and achieves state-of-the-art performance on various benchmarks, outperforming competitors in text and multimodal tasks. The models are distributed under the Apache 2.0 license, promoting both academic and commercial use.

Baidu announced significant advancements at the 2025 Smart Economy Forum. Baidu Smart Cloud partnered with 65% of China’s central SOEs to boost the LLM industry. They launched the Qianfan Huijin Financial LLM and introduced industry-specific intelligent agents. Baidu also deployed “Ten Thousand Card” and “Thirty Thousand Card” clusters on the Baige GPU platform, designed for efficient LLM training and inference and compatible with various models.

IDC’s 2025 report ranked Baidu’s Ernie LLM as the leading model in China, achieving top scores in seven out of eight evaluation dimensions. Competing against LLMs from OpenAI, Alibaba, and others, Ernie outperformed in areas like functionality, usability, and ecosystem integration. The report highlighted Ernie’s advanced capabilities, including multi-turn dialogue, image understanding, and translation. Baidu’s strategic positioning across the tech stack and its PaddlePaddle platform contribute to Ernie’s comprehensive product matrix and strong ecosystem, positioning it to drive AI-driven solutions across multiple industries.

Baidu is suing Xiaomi and Shanghai Yiyi Information Technology for unfair competition. The case, scheduled for June 13th in Shanghai, highlights the intensifying competition within China’s tech industry. Baidu, the core entity of Baidu Group, and Xiaomi, a major consumer tech innovator, haven’t issued public comments on the matter.

Baidu’s Q1 2025 earnings revealed a modest revenue increase and a strong net profit surge. The report’s focus, however, shifted to disclosed payments for CEO Robin Li’s private plane use. Baidu stated these expenses, already detailed in the annual report, were approved, standard practice, and based on market rates. While the earnings report revealed overall performance details, the specifics of the plane-related expenses weren’t itemized.

Baidu’s Q1 2025 revenue rose 3% year-over-year to ¥32.45B ($4.47B), beating estimates, though non-GAAP net profit fell 8% to ¥6.47B amid increased AI R&D investments. CEO Robin Li emphasized prioritizing applied AI innovations over foundational models, announcing development of Ernie 5.0 and plans to open-source Ernie 4.5 by June 30. The company aims to commercialize digital human technology and scale its autonomous driving unit, Apollo Go, which operates 1,000 driverless vehicles in 15 cities. Ride-hailing orders surged 75% to 1.4M trips in Q1, totaling 11M cumulative journeys. Li projected profitability through cost reductions and operational scaling, positioning Apollo Go as a future growth engine.