Chinese search engine and artificial intelligence pioneer Baidu is casting AI as the engine of China’s push for “new productive forces”, touting the emerging technology as a linchpin of Beijing’s economic growth drive.
Baidu stock price gained 2.2 per cent in Hong Kong on Thursday morning to $HK113.6.
Li wrote in the opinion piece that Baidu was a key AI power in China, putting its own Ernie model family on par with DeepSeek, the Chinese AI start-up whose low-cost models have shaken up the global large language model market.
Baidu’s Ernie family – short for “Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration” – is the company’s flagship line of large language and multimodal models, powering its Ernie Bot chatbot and a range of cloud and enterprise AI services.
“Baidu … has the responsibility, the capability and the confidence to lead this transformation,” Li said, pledging to increase the company’s AI investment to develop frontier AI infrastructure and AI model technology.
