companies
Baidu
China's dominant search engine operator and a full-stack AI company, building the ERNIE foundation models, Apollo autonomous driving, and enterprise AI cloud services.
Founded in Beijing in January 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu, Baidu grew from a search-ranking algorithm called RankDex into China's dominant search engine and one of the country's largest AI research operations. The company trades on both Nasdaq and the Hong Kong Stock Exchange and employs close to 40,000 people. Since 2019 Baidu has poured R&D spending into its ERNIE (Wenxin) family of foundation models, which now underpin its consumer chatbot, its Apollo Go robotaxi fleet, and enterprise offerings sold through the Qianfan cloud platform. Baidu was among the first Chinese firms to answer ChatGPT with a public LLM chatbot, launching Ernie Bot in 2023. Domestically, Baidu still competes hard against DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, and Moonshot's Kimi for developer mindshare, and its search-ads business remains under pressure as AI chat interfaces change how people look things up online.
- Founded
- 2000
- Headquarters
- Beijing, China
- Sector
- enterprise
Tools
- ERNIE Bot (Wenxin Yiyan)
ERNIE Bot, also called Wenxin Yiyan, is Baidu's AI assistant for chat, writing, document work, reasoning, and other creative tasks.
- Baidu Comate
Baidu Comate is an AI coding assistant for code completion, generation, review, testing, debugging, and software development tasks.