As part of a larger management transition, Baidu has named Haijian He as its new chief financial officer.
Prior to joining Baidu, he was executive director and CFO of Kingsoft Cloud Holdings from 2020. Last month, Kingsoft Cloud said that He would be leaving those positions on June 30, 2025.
In the past, he worked for prestigious financial firms such as Citigroup Global Markets, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and Goldman Sachs.
The appointment coincided with a number of leadership changes made by the Chinese search engine.
Junjie He will assume the position of senior vice president, managing administrative and human resources, replacing his current position as interim CFO.
According to the corporation, Shanshan Cui will be the secretary general of Baidu's corporate culture committee.
Baidu, a once-dominant force in China's tech industry, has had difficulty in recent years finding fresh sources of development.
Baidu has been engaged in new fields like artificial intelligence and autonomous driving due to the slowing demand for internet advertising, which has historically been the company's main income.
Although its main AI product, the Ernie chatbot, garnered notice when it was first released, it is currently facing increasing competition from both established tech giants like Alibaba Group and ByteDance as well as startup competitors like DeepSeek. According to aicpb.com, a website that tracks AI products, as of April, Ernie Bot was the eighth-highest Chinese chatbot in terms of monthly active users.
In the face of a global AI rivalry that is getting more intense, Baidu said that it will make its Ernie generative AI large language model (LLM) open-source.
Baidu hopes to promote a more cooperative open-source AI environment by lowering access barriers for developers and academics by providing Ernie's pre-trained weights and inference code completely open-source.
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According to industry analysts, Baidu's choice to make Ernie open-source is a turning point for China's AI industry. The action is a major step to speed up AI adoption and innovation as well as an important attempt by Baidu to compete with international AI competitors.
With the rise of DeepSeek, Baidu is one of several Chinese IT firms that have made significant investments in AI. This has led to the emergence of numerous high-end open-source models. With more than 200 million downloads worldwide and more than 100,000 derivative models, Alibaba Cloud's Qwen2.5-Max, for instance, has surpassed Meta's Llama as the largest open-source model group globally, according to domestic news agencies in China.