Baidu confirms VP Wu Tian has left after nearly 20 years

Baidu has confirmed that Wu Tian, group vice president and vice president of Baidu Research, has left the company. A Baidu PR manager said the company's tech work is still moving forward. Wu Tian spent about 20 years at Baidu and was one of the key tech leads behind ERNIE Bot in its early days.

She joined Baidu in 2006 after getting her master's degree from Zhejiang University. She once led Baidu's foundation model team, reporting directly to CEO Robin Li. In May she moved to Baidu Research, and in July tech expert Sun Tianxiang took over the team.

Right before her exit was confirmed, Baidu open-sourced ERNIE Unlimited OCR 2. The model can read documents of any length, not just a few dozen pages. It hit top end-to-end scores, decodes 5.6 times faster than the last version, and once parsed over 3,600 pages in one go.

Insiders say new progress on the ERNIE model will be released next week. Baidu World 2026 will be held on November 12, showing the OCR model's highlights and Baidu's latest full-stack AI upgrades.