GuShiio.com Article source: Industrial Technology
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Baidu, which is ALL in AI, is being surrounded by AI.
In 2025, with the explosion of DeepSeek and the access of major platforms and enterprises, the artificial intelligence market format has undergone drastic changes. The open source free AI model poses new challenges to the business model of closed AI models. Who can win the new round of AI competitions? Winning the top spot has become a market focus.
In recent years, many players have gathered on domestic AI tracks, from major technology Internet companies such as Ali, Tencent, and ByteDance to a large number of AI startups such as the “AI Six Little Dragons” and the popular DeepSeek. For Baidu, it is once again facing another major challenge after the transformation of its AI strategy.
Baidu was one of the earliest companies in China to propose a comprehensive layout of AI technology. The earliest batch of AI talents who left Baidu constituted a distinct force in the AI entrepreneurial wave in China. For this reason, Baidu was once called the “AI Whampoa Military Academy”, but whether it will repeat the mistake of “catching a late episode”, every next move is crucial.
The missed AI “golden power accumulation period”
A few days ago, Baidu released its fourth quarter and full-year financial report for 2024. Data showed that Baidu’s total revenue in 2024 reached 133.1 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 1%, and its net profit was 23.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 21%.
As one of its core businesses, Baidu’s online marketing revenue in the fourth quarter of 2024 was 17.9 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 7%; in December 2024, the number of monthly active users of Baidu APP reached 679 million, an increase of 2% over the same period last year, but compared with the previous quarter’s 704 million, it was a decrease of 3.55%.
Faced with this mixed financial report, Robin Li pointed out in the earnings conference call: “The AI cloud business showed strong momentum, with revenue increasing by 26% year-on-year, offsetting the weakness of our online marketing business. The growth is mainly due to widespread market recognition of our AI capabilities, and we will continue to invest in AI to ensure we remain at the forefront of this technological trend.”
But it is not easy to be at the forefront of the general trend of AI technology. If Baidu can achieve relevant achievements in the AI field that are comparable to OpenAI ChatGPT or Google DeepMind, AI will be ready to turn around. But at present, since Baidu proposed “ALL in AI” in 2017, the golden market period for AI technology has passed. Baidu, which has not shaken off its AI peers, has become increasingly difficult to use AI as a springboard to return to the ranks of supergiants.
Among Internet technology giants,”BAT” used to exist side by side, but now, few people talk about BAT anymore because Baidu’s revenue level is no longer on the same level as Alibaba and Tencent.
Alibaba’s revenue in the fourth quarter of 2024 was 280.154 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 8%. Taotian Group’s revenue alone reached 136.091 billion yuan; Tencent’s revenue in the third quarter of 2024 was 167.193 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 8%. The revenue of the two giants in a single quarter exceeded Baidu’s annual revenue level.
At this year’s earnings call, Alibaba Group CEO Wu Yongming mentioned that in the next three years, Alibaba’s investment in cloud and AI infrastructure will exceed the total of Alibaba in the past ten years. Tencent has recently also used social software such as WeChat as a user. The hands are launching major moves in the AI field, and the two giants are guaranteed to fight in the AI field.
Does AI technology have a chance to bring Baidu back to the ranks of giants? There should have been, but the prerequisite is whether Baidu can far surpass its China counterparts and even reach the world’s leading level on the AI track.
Take OpenAI as an example. The company has been deploying General Artificial Intelligence (AGI) since its establishment in 2015. At first, it did not have any excellent products. However, with the continuous deepening of AI technology, it finally became popular after the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, triggering a global In-depth thinking and discussion of artificial intelligence from all walks of life are still the leader of top AI models, achieving another breakthrough in artificial intelligence technology following the achievements of Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo series.
In 2025, if SoftBank Group completes a US$40 billion investment in OpenAI, the company’s post-investment valuation will reach US$300 billion. What is this concept? Alibaba’s U.S. stock market value is about US$340 billion, and Tencent’s market value is about US$514 billion. To make a hypothetical example, if Baidu takes the lead in launching “ChatGPT”-level AI applications in China after the “ALL in AI” transformation and can continue to lead in technology, US$300 billion + the current market value of Baidu’s U.S. stocks of about US$32 billion, it is not impossible to be on an equal footing with Alibaba and Tencent, but unfortunately there is no ifs.
Baidu began to carry out research and application of deep learning in early 2012. From 2013 to 2015, Baidu Deep Learning Research Institute (IDL), Big Data Laboratory (BDL), Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SVAIL), etc. were established one after another. It once gathered many world-class experts in the AI field at home and abroad. Even if the transformation of “ALL in AI” was not announced until 2017, it was not too late from the time point of view. The key lies in how to lay out AI technology during this golden AI accumulation period. What kind of AI technology to develop, whether to pursue the world’s top technical level or rush to commercialize AI, the choice directly affects the outcome of the story.
DeepSeek is actually a good example of its ability to have an impact on global technology giants in the AI field. It has achieved the results of benchmarking open source free models against OpenAI’s flagship o1 model. However, OpenAI also has the upcoming GPT-4.5 and GPT-5. Who will benchmark is a collective test for China AI companies. It is not known whether Baidu will win the first place.
In the long run, whether Baidu can become a representative of China’s top AI technology is the key to turning around AI. However, there is no time and opportunity now to accumulate strength and break through in the fiercely competitive AI market. Compared with ten years ago, the difficulty coefficient has soared several times.
Forced “open source free” transformation
When it was transitioning from the PC era to the mobile Internet era, Baidu missed a chance to take off because it fell behind in the competition. The recent changes in the AI market and the fierce battle for “AI entrances” have made Baidu a bit passive. Despite its deep cultivation of AI technology for so many years, it seems that it has not grasped the pulse of the development of the AI market.
Recently, Tencent has leveraged the popularity of DeepSeek to develop the AI market, which is a very important development. The access of “National Application” WeChat to the full-blooded version of DeepSeek-R1 has instantly brought unprecedented market attention. Tencent has also used its huge user base to launch an impact on the “AI search” market. Data shows that the combined monthly active accounts of WeChat and WeChat have reached 1.382 billion. The development of AI search habits for these users is undoubtedly huge commercial potential.
Immediately afterwards, a series of products such as Tencent Yuanbao AI Model, ima, QQ Browser, Tencent AI Code Assistant, and Tencent Cloud Smart Computing all completed DeepSeek access, taking advantage of the trend to catch up with the market.
Ali took advantage of the ride of “Apple AI” to become the target of market re-evaluation. According to research firm QuestMobile data and related reports, Apple has about 250 million users in China. Apple’s AI has been implemented in China. According to theory, Baidu, which has been deeply involved in AI technology for many years, should become the number one primary partner, but Apple finally preferred Ali.
Canalys data shows that in the third quarter of 2024, Alibaba Cloud accounted for 36% of the cloud market in the mainland of China, ranking first in the market; in addition, after Deepseek became popular in the global open source community, Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen Qwen series models have also become a closely watched existence. Currently, the global downloads of Qwen series models have reached 180 million, and the cumulative total number of derivative models has reached 90,000, surpassing Meta Llama to become the world’s largest open source model series. Whether it is due to considerations of the influence of cloud computing or AI technology, it gives Apple sufficient reasons to give priority.
The new giant ByteDance established the AGI long-term research team “Seed Edge” in January 2025. According to public data, in December 2024, the monthly active users of its AI application Doubao App exceeded 75 million. It is a strong competitor that Baidu’s “new search” tool Wen Xiaoyan App. Moreover, according to QuestMobile data, the number of users of Douyin, a subsidiary of ByteDance, will reach 1.108 billion after being deduplicated in 2025. Become the most powerful channel and engine to promote AI applications.
In the face of the wave of DeepSeek and the AI competition among Alibaba, Tencent, and Byte, Baidu’s “taking advantage of the momentum” has slightly revealed some weaknesses.
During the 2024 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Robin Li once said in a public speech that everyone should not roll AI models, but remove applications. He mentioned that without applications, basic models alone are worthless whether open source or closed source.
However, in order to keep up with changes in the market rhythm, Baidu, which has been engaged in closed AI models, recently announced a series of operations in accessing DeepSeek. For example, Baidu search will be fully connected to DeepSeek and Wenxin Model’s in-depth search functions. Wenxin Model announced that it will be fully free from April 1. Wenxin Model 4.5 series will be launched and open source in the next few months. However, such adjustments alone have no obvious advantages in today’s AI market competition. How to build a new business model after open source is also a major difficulty. Baidu, which is difficult to lead the market development situation, has increasingly no choice.
Whether the Wenxin Model 4.5 series can bring sensation in the industry after being open source may be the key to the success or failure of Baidu’s next move. However, open source free does not mean that it has relaxed its technical level requirements. Whether Baidu can surpass DeepSeek and Ali Qwen in AI technology innovation can withstand the rise of powerful applications such as bean buns among free applications can be said to be challenging.
Baidu still needs to “solve” inward
There are also some market changes coming from AI technology for autonomous driving on sub-segments of track.
At the beginning of 2025, two companies once praised as autonomous driving unicorns, Vertical Vision Technology and Tucson, were exposed to have a worrying future. Due to problems such as the exhaustion of capital flow and failure to go public, the company has fallen into survival difficulties; Tucson has experienced fluctuations such as management battles and transformation difficulties in the future, and announced the dissolution of some teams.
The market value of Wenyuan Zhixing and Xiaoma Zhixing, which have been successfully listed, has increased recently. As of February 21, 2025, the total market value of Wenyuan Zhixing (WRD) is US$6.703 billion, and the total market value of PONY (PONY) is US$9.172 billion.
However,”insufficient blood-making capacity” is still a dilemma that autonomous driving tracks have not yet got rid of. Financial report data shows that Wenyuan Zhixing’s total revenue in the first three quarters of 2024 was 220 million yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 14.3%, but the net loss was as high as 1.924 billion yuan, and the adjusted net loss was also 556 million yuan; Xiaoma Zhixing’s revenue in the first half of 2024 was US$24.72 million, and the net loss was US$51.78 million.
In addition to the Wenxin model, Baidu’s key layout in the field of autonomous driving will hardly become a strong business growth point in the short term, and market changes are not optimistic. With the rapid deployment of Huawei, Didi Chuxing, etc. in the field of autonomous driving, almost all today’s car companies are accelerating smart cockpits and self-developing autonomous driving technology. It is another competitive situation that is raging all over the place. Radish Run wants to break through and escape the same pressure.
It can be said that if you cannot be the strongest in the industry in the AI field, you will fall into the second or even the third echelon, and the competitive environment will become more crowded.
According to the “Global Digital Economy White Paper (2024)”, as of July 2024, there are 1328 large artificial intelligence models in the world, and the number of large models in China accounts for 36%. Based on this ratio, the number of large AI models in China is approximately 478, and the number of manufacturers in various fields involved is large.
Judging from the current trend, the AI industry is destined to be a blooming situation everywhere. How high can Baidu of ALL in AI take off from the AI outlet? This is actually not a new problem caused by changes in the market environment, but an old problem that Baidu urgently needs to solve internally. problem:
In the process of transitioning from the PC era to the mobile Internet era, and then from the mobile Internet era to the AI era, what is missing?
