How big is the wild hope for Baidu's entry into new search?
On March 16, 2023, ERNIE Bot, a big language model of Baidu, "came out after a thousand calls" and officially launched the test invitation. On August 31 of the same year, ERNIE Bot was fully opened to the whole society, and the APP was officially launched.
Now, when ERNIE Bot APP welcomes the "anniversary ceremony", Baidu (09888. HK; BIDU. O) has made another big move. On September 4, ERNIE Bot APP launched an upgraded version and changed its name to "Wenxiaoyan", positioning it as a new search intelligent assistant under Baidu.
At the same time, the Baidu AI Innovation Business Department behind Wen Xiaoyan has quietly emerged. The person at the helm is Xue Su, the former vice president of Kwai who joined Baidu earlier this year. According to his own interpretation, the mission of the AI Innovation Business Department is to "apply AI to C-end products". Undoubtedly, Wen Xiaoyan is the "pioneer" of this mission.
The intention behind Baidu's tweets is not difficult to understand. Since the beginning of this year, AI search has been boiling oil, but as the absolute top player in domestic search, Baidu is hard to say that it is flourishing. Under the impact of new and old competitors, Baidu urgently needs to face the capital market and tell its own new search story.
Wen Xiaoyan has arrived
"From youth to adulthood" is Xue Su's understanding of the renaming of ERNIE Bot APP at this time.
But choosing to rename the product on its anniversary is just an opportunity. The deeper reason is that after the "coming of age ceremony", Wen Xiaoyan wants to reach more C-end users and become a pan C-end product.
The primary characteristic that such a product should possess is undoubtedly user friendliness. This is difficult for ERNIE Bot to take into account, which also refers to Baidu's big language model, B-end market and technology. Therefore, renaming has become a mandatory option.
"Baidu's move is for a clearer product positioning: ERNIE Bot is Baidu's base big language model, and Wenxiaoyan is a personal assistant for C-end users." Lu Yanxia, IDC's China research director, said to the 21st Century Business Herald reporter, "The words of the same name are easy to confuse."
At the same time, in Xue Su's view, the new name "Wen Xiaoyan" also implies its underlying product concept, which is the new search assistant. Different from the strong tool attribute of traditional search, the new search intelligent assistant means a change from tool oriented to human oriented.
Our product wants to become more human and possess more human abilities, "Xue Su emphasized to 21st Century Business Herald reporters." We hope that Xiaoyan can enter our lives. It is not only a tool, but also our friend, think tank, and confidant
From the introduction, it can be seen that the functions of the Wen Xiaoyan APP have been significantly enhanced, providing a more diverse range of usage scenarios. Based on the Baidu Wenxin big model, Wenxiaoyan provides users with five core scene abilities: questioning, chatting, creating, drawing, and assigning tasks.
This means that users can not only ask various types of questions to Wen Xiaoyan in various ways such as voice, text, and images, but also chat with him in conversation. Whether it is practicing speaking, interviewing, emotional companionship, game interaction, etc., they can be satisfied. At the same time, they can also use Wen Xiaoyan to write and create images, or input commands to assign tasks to Wen Xiaoyan and customize subscriptions to various types of information.
It is worth noting that Wen Xiaoyan also has memory and personalized functions, remembering all the preferences and requirements of users, thus providing users with more personalized services.
All of these point to that abstract word: human nature. Behind it is Baidu's understanding of new searches.
Dark War New Search
Since the beginning of this year, the search war has been raging. Currently, a large number of AI search products have emerged worldwide.
When native AI search tools such as Perplexity AI, YOU, Mita, etc. are in a period of breaking through user circles, chatbots like Kimi and Tiangong AI have improved their online search functions into AI search tools, attempting to grab a share of the search market.
At the same time, traditional search engines such as Google and Bing are also adding AI capabilities. At the end of July, OpenAI launched its search product SearchGPT, pushing the search war to another climax.
As an important player in the domestic search engine market, Baidu has provided its new search answer with a brief introduction. In Baidu's view, compared to traditional search and even existing AI search products, new search means a completely new transformation in product and capability dimensions.
Xue Su analyzed to 21st Century Business Herald reporters that both traditional search engines and current AI searches on the market are primarily focused on search. Search means passive and responsive behavior, "coming when summoned, leaving when wielded, not coming when not summoned", and does not escape from instrumental characteristics.
But the new search scenario is not limited to this, not only search, but also creation and chat, showcasing the scene of "search creation chat".
From passive to active, from generalization to personalization, from high threshold voice text communication to low threshold and more attractive hyper realistic digital human communication, these are all changes from instrumentality to humanity, "Xue Su pointed out.
The 'main force' and the 'vanguard'
For a long time, search has been a good business. This has also brought a truly prosperous scene of "making money while lying down" to Baidu.
Nowadays, search is still a good business. According to QYResearch data, the global search engine market is expected to exceed $200 billion in 2023 and reach $388.7 billion by 2029.
But the trend is quietly changing. At present, the evolution of products on the market and the consistent actions of entrants all point to a unified cognitive trend: generative AI will inevitably overturn traditional search models. Gartner, a third-party research firm, predicts that by 2026, the search volume of traditional search engines may decrease by 25%.
In other words, the global search engine market with a scale of over 200 billion US dollars may be about to change. Baidu naturally does not take it lightly. But in this wave, it is still unknown whether new search is a good business and whether Baidu can continue to "lie down and win".
Indeed, Baidu is already transforming its search business with generative AI. Robin Lee revealed at the just concluded Q2 financial report conference that 18% of Baidu search results have been generated by AI. But now that Baidu has chosen to "sacrifice" Wen Xiaoyan, the underlying message is probably that this self reform "still needs to go faster".
In Xue Su's view, Baidu Search already has a lot of AI capabilities and is also the "big brother" and "main force" of the internal new search camp. In contrast, Wen Xiaoyan is the "vanguard" and the "assault team" of AI native applications, with a more aggressive approach and taking a step forward. In other words, Wen Xiaoyan has more advanced products and is an explorer of new technologies and abilities.
Therefore, from a strategic perspective, Baidu's move is more like responding to the increasing number of AI search competitors in the market with simple words, and expanding the user circle within Baidu's search ecosystem. As for the follow-up between Wen Xiaoyan and the main search format, "they mutually promote each other
However, from the current perspective, it is still difficult to say the outcome of Wen Xiaoyan. On September 4th, as of the close of the Hong Kong stock market, Baidu's stock price closed at HKD 80.65, a slight decrease of 0.74%; As of press time, Baidu's US stock market also maintained a slight decline before trading, with a drop of 0.52%. It seems that the attitude of the capital market is not clear and is still observing.
Lu Yanxia told the 21st Century Business Herald reporter that compared with other domestic search products, Wen Xiaoyan's advantage lies in that it is based on a stronger base model, namely the ERNIE Bot big language model of Baidu. But she also pointed out that there is still great uncertainty in the future search market.
Currently, both traditional search vendors such as Baidu and 360 are entering the market, as well as new companies such as Tiangong and Mita, "Lu Yanxia told 21st Century Business Herald reporters. Despite the large number of entrants, there are still many problems with AI search, whether it is unclear profit models or limited user base limited to the high-tech community, which are challenges for existing AI search products.