Baidu strengthens ernie large model team with new leadership and talent

Baidu has bolstered its ERNIE large model development by appointing Wu Qin, a senior researcher from a North American Frontier Lab, as part of its BMU team. Wu Qin, who has contributed to multiple generations of large models over the past two years, will focus on enhancing pre-training capabilities. Meanwhile, Wei Haoran, a former DeepSeek researcher, has joined BMU as head of the multimodal algorithm team. Wei joined Baidu in early 2026 and led the release of the Unlimited OCR model in June 2026, achieving the top global score in the OmniDocBench benchmark. Sun Tianxiang, head of BMU, announced these moves on September 3, 2026, emphasizing the dual technical and organizational upgrades of the ERNIE model. Sun, who took office in July 2026, is also part of Baidu’s Model Committee and Technical Strategy Committee, aiming to align the model with international frontiers.