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Baidu has launched a series of AI applications after its chatbot Ernie received public approval.
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Chinese technology giant Baidu He has launched two new artificial intelligence models, since he competes to recover his leadership position in the country’s fiercely competitive space.
Baidu’s models Launched on Sunday It included the first model focused on the company’s reasoning, as well as its first movement to an open source license strategy.
However, experts told CNBC that, although the launch of the models is a positive development for Baidu, they also highlight how they are playing reaching its Ernie Bot, one of China’s first versions of a chatbot similar to Chatgpt, struggle to obtain a generalized adoption.
“The new models make Baidu more competitive since the company has lagged behind in a reasoning model launch,” Lian Juye, Omdia Chief Analyst told CNBC.
A reasoning model is a large language model that divides tasks into smaller pieces and considers multiple approaches before generating an answer. It is designed to process complex problems similar to humans.
The Chinese Startup Depseek changed the overall career of AI and transformed the Chinese ecosystem in January when it launched its R1 reasoning model, which rivaled the US competitors despite costing a price fraction.
Baidu has saying His new Ernie X1 reasoning model “offers performance with Deepseek R1 to only half the price” and has “understanding, planning, reflection and stronger evolution.” CNBC has not been able to independently verify this claim.
According to Wei Sun, main artificial intelligence analyst at Counterpoint Research, Baidu’s future competitiveness could depend on whether its new models meet the promised performance and cost advantages.
“Baidu is clearly in recovery mode, largely due to its slow pace of innovation and underestimating the rapid changes in market dynamics,” said Sun.
What happened?
Baidu launched its first generative platform to the public in 2023, giving China one of its first responses to the popular Chatgpt of Openai.
However, despite Initial impulseBaidu’s Ernie product has since been since then eclipsed by competitors including new companies, as well as large -technology companies such as Alibaba and bytedance.
Experts list a series of reasons for Baidu’s struggles and the slow innovation rate.
“Baidu was left behind when they tried to build patented models and compete for the financing of AI,” said Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder of Constellation Research, CNBC. He added that the company has also suffered recent government and distracted with “regulatory nonsense.”
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The patented models maintain their source code and their confidential underlying architecture, in contrast to the Depseek models, whose source code is freely available on the open network for a possible modification and redistribution.
“The use of a closed code approach means that (Baidu) was training its model from scratch, while open source models could take advantage of certain parts that were communal for developers,” said Kai Wang, Morningstar’s senior capital analyst.
However, Baidu’s latest AI models represent a change in the company’s strategy towards open and free models.
“Baidu has always supported its patented business model and was a member against open source, but disruptors like Deepseek have shown that open source models can be so competitive,” said OMDIA’s su.
He added that Baidu is “simply following the foot” of his greatest competitors in China, namely, Alibaba, Deepseek and Tencent, who have now launched open source models.
Baidu advantages
According to Morningstar’s Wang, AI players such as Baidu have new models every month or so, and competitors constantly try to overcome each advance.
However, “the differentiator in the Chinese models remains the data used for the models and the case of use of the application,” Wang said.
In these areas, experts see some key advantages for Baidu, which operates a wide range of popular applications and services, including its flagship search engine, which offers access to AI tools, as well as its application in the online forum, Baidu Tieba.
“Due to its large user base in the consumer space, particularly in the search and recommendation systems of AI, the company can still maintain its leadership position in the market whenever it is kept up to date with the innovation cycle,” said the OMDIA.
During a Profit call at the end of last yearThe Baidu CEO, Robin Li, said he hopes that the generative AI converts the search for Baidu into the “new killer application in the AI era.”
“The secret of AI are the data, the chips, the good mathematics and the cheap energy … it must have data to play. They have the data,” said Wang de Constellation Research.
