Baidu, once China’s generative AI leader, is battling to regain its position

The Chinese giant of Baidu technology has published two new free artificial intelligence models when he was delighted to find his main position in the country’s space of the country.

The Baidu models launched on Sunday included the first model focused on the reasoning of the company, and Come before the plans To evolve towards an open source strategy.

However, the experts told CNBC that, although the release of the models is a positive development for Baidu, they also highlight how he plays the catch -up as a Bot Ernie – one of the first versions of China of a chatgpt type chatbot – is struggling to obtain a general adoption.

“The new models make Baidu more competitive since the company has lagged behind in a version of the reasoning model,” said Lian Jye Su, Omdia chief analyst in CNBC.

A model of reasoning is a large language model which breaks down the tasks into smaller pieces and considers several approaches before generating an answer. It is designed to deal with complex problems in the same way as humans.

The Chinese startup Deepseek upset the IA world breed and transformed the Chinese ecosystem in January when it published its R1 reasoning model, which competed with American competitors despite the cost of a fraction of the price.

Baidu declared that its new model of reasoning Ernie X1 “offers equal performance with Deepseek R1 to only half of the price” and has “an understanding, planning, thinking and stronger evolution capacities”. CNBC has not been able to independently check this complaint.

According to Wei Sun, the main analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, the future competitiveness of Baidu could depend on whether its new models offer the promised advantages and the costs of costs.

“Baidu is clearly in catch-up mode, largely because of its slow rhythm of innovation and the underestimation of rapid changes in market dynamics,” said Sun.

Baidu deployed its first generative AI platform to the public in 2023, giving China one of its first responses to the popular Chatbot IA of the Openai chatbot.

However, despite The initial momentum, the Ernie de Baidu product has since been overshadowed by competitors, including startups as well as large technology companies such as Alibaba and Bytedance.

Experts list a number of reasons for Baidu’s difficulties and the slowdown in the innovation rate.

“Baidu has lagged behind when they tried to build proprietary models and compete in the financing of AI,” Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder of Constellation Research told CNBC. He added that the company has also suffered from recent government repressions and was distracted by “regulatory nonsense”.

Owner models keep their source code and confidential underlying architecture, unlike Deepseek models, the source code of which is freely available on the open web for possible modification and redistribution.

“The use of a closed source approach means that [Baidu] Training of its model from zero while the open source models were able to take advantage of certain parts which were in common from the developers, “said Kai Wang, principal analyst in actions for Morningstar.

Baidu, however, said last month That he would make his new generation Ernie Opence IA model from June 30, according to Reuters.

“Baidu has always been very favorable to its owner commercial model and has been vocal against open source, but disruptors like Deepseek have proven that open source models can be so competitive,” said Su Omdia.

He added that Baidu “simply follows the step” of his greatest competitors in China, namely Alibaba, Deepseek and Tencent, who all published open-source models.

According to Wang de Morningstar, AI players like Baidu offer new models every month, competitors constantly trying to surpass each progress.

However, “The Chinese model differentiator remains the data used for models and the use of the application,” said Wang.

In these fields, experts see certain 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 online forum application, Baidu Tieba.

“Due to its large user base in the consumer space, in particular in AI research and recommendation systems, the company can always maintain its leadership position on the market as long as it follows the innovation cycle,” said Omdia’s SU.

During The call for results at the end of last year, Baidu CEO, Robin Li, said that he expects generative to transform Baidu’s search in the “new Killer application in the AI ​​era”.

“The secret of AI is the data, the chips, the good mathematics and the cheap energy … You must have data to play. They have the data,” said Wang de Constellation Research.

Correction: This article has been updated to indicate that the new Baidu AI models are free.