Baidu Establishes Two New Large Model R&D Departments Reporting Directly to CEO
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Baidu creates two new large model R&D departments reporting directly to CEO Robin Li, with Wu Tian leading foundation models and Jia Lei heading applied models, further sharpening its AI edge.
November 25, 2025 – Baidu announced a major technical reorganization, creating two new departments dedicated to large model development, both reporting directly to CEO Robin Li:
- Foundation Model R&D Department – Led by Wu Tian, tasked with building highly intelligent and scalable general-purpose AI models.
- Applied Model R&D Department – Led by Jia Lei, focusing on fine-tuning and exploring domain-specific models for business scenarios.
Wang Haifeng continues as CTO, Chair of the Technical Strategy Committee, and Dean of Baidu Research Institute.
Wu Tian and Jia Lei are long-time homegrown Baidu technical leaders, highlighting the company’s talent depth and ongoing push toward younger leadership. The move elevates large model R&D to the highest level, adopting a “divide-and-conquer” strategy to strengthen Baidu’s core AI competitiveness and better meet customer and user needs.
On November 13, Baidu launched ERNIE 5.0, its native full-modality large model featuring unified multimodal modeling and ultra-sparse MoE architecture. It supports integrated understanding and generation across text, image, audio, and video.
On the authoritative global benchmark LMSYS Arena, the ERNIE 5.0 Preview ranked tied for 2nd worldwide (1st in China) on the text leaderboard and 1st in China on the vision understanding leaderboard.
Source: Baidu Official
