Who's who · Chinese labs
Baidu
Chinese search company that builds the ERNIE models, the ERNIE Assistant and the Apollo Go robotaxis.
At a glance
- Founded
- 2000
- Based in
- Beijing, China
- People
- Robin Li, Chief executive and co-founder; Haijian He, Chief financial officer
- Known for
- ERNIE 5.1, ERNIE 4.5, ERNIE Assistant, Apollo Go
- Licence
- Apache 2.0 for ERNIE 4.5 open-weight models
- Funding
- Public: NASDAQ BIDU, HKEX 9888
- AI share of revenue
- 50% of general business revenue (Q2 2026)
- Website
- https://ernie.baidu.com
Baidu is a Beijing technology company, best known for China's largest search engine, that now describes itself as an AI-first company. Its AI work centres on the ERNIE family of large language models, the ERNIE Assistant app, AI search, its AI cloud and the Apollo Go robotaxi service, which operates in 28 cities.
In mid-2025 Baidu released the ERNIE 4.5 family as open weights under the Apache 2.0 licence. Its current flagship, ERNIE 5.1, was released on 9 May 2026. It builds on the earlier ERNIE 5.0 and is offered through the ERNIE website and Baidu's AI Studio developer platform.
In the second quarter of 2026 Baidu's AI-powered businesses made up 50% of its general business revenue, up from 38% a year earlier. Shareholders approved a change to a dual-primary listing in Hong Kong in August 2026, which Baidu expects to take effect this year.
Sources
- Baidu (SEC filing), Baidu Announces Second Quarter 2026 Results, 2026-08-18
- Baidu, ERNIE 5.1 Officially Released, 2026-05-09
- Baidu (Hugging Face), baidu/ERNIE-4.5-300B-A47B-PT, 2025-06-30
- TechNode, Baidu open-sources ERNIE 4.5 series models, including multimodal MoE architecture, 2025-07-01
Facts last checked 2026-10-02