China's leading search company, developer of the ERNIE models and Baidu Translate.
Baidu, founded in Beijing in 2000, operates China's dominant search engine and has invested heavily in AI. Its ERNIE family of large language models powers the ERNIE Bot assistant, and Baidu Translate is one of the most widely used machine translation services for Chinese. Baidu also develops speech recognition, autonomous driving (Apollo) and cloud AI services. It is a key indicator of the Chinese AI ecosystem, which develops largely separately from US platforms and matters for any localization program targeting China.