Baidu, headquartered in Beijing, is one of China’s largest technology companies and a leader in artificial intelligence research and deployment. Founded in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu, Baidu began as China’s dominant search engine and has since expanded into cloud computing, autonomous driving, and generative AI—making it one of the country’s most influential AI players.
Baidu’s flagship AI model is ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration), first introduced as a pre-training framework in 2019 and later expanded into ERNIE Bot, launched publicly in 2023. ERNIE Bot quickly became one of China’s most widely used large language models, offering capabilities in natural language understanding, reasoning, and multimodal generation. Integrated into Baidu Search, Baidu Maps, and other applications, ERNIE represents the country’s strongest competitor to OpenAI’s GPT series.
Beyond generative AI, Baidu has invested heavily in autonomous driving through its Apollo platform. Apollo Go, the company’s robotaxi service, operates in multiple Chinese cities and represents one of the most advanced commercial deployments of self-driving cars in the world. Combined with Baidu Cloud’s AI offerings, the company has created a vertically integrated ecosystem spanning consumer, enterprise, and mobility applications.
Baidu also plays a central role in China’s national AI strategy. Its focus on knowledge integration—embedding structured facts and reasoning into large language models—aligns with government priorities to ensure AI systems are both capable and aligned with local values. At the same time, Baidu’s open innovation model has made ERNIE a foundation for startups and enterprises building applications across finance, education, and healthcare.
By 2025, Baidu had established itself as China’s flagship frontier lab, balancing commercial services with deep research. Under the leadership of CEO Robin Li, the company continues to push boundaries in generative AI, autonomous driving, and cloud, reinforcing its role as one of the most important AI players outside the West.
