Baidu confirmed the departure of Wu Tian, who served as Vice President of the Baidu Group and Deputy Dean of the Baidu Research Institute. Wu, who joined the company in 2006 after graduating from Zhejiang University, spent approximately 20 years at the firm and played a key role in the early development of the Ernie model.
Following organizational changes in 2025, Wu led the foundation model R&D department before transitioning to her role at the research institute in May. In July, Sun Tianxiang took over the foundation model department. Despite these leadership shifts, sources indicate that new developments regarding the Ernie model are expected to be announced next week.
On October 27, Baidu released the open-source Unlimited OCR 2 model, which allows for the processing of documents of any length. The model utilizes a sparse reference sliding window attention mechanism, achieving a single-step decoding speed 7 times faster than Full Attention. It scored 84.6 and 77.1 on the MPDocBench and MarathonDocBench benchmarks, respectively.
The company plans to showcase further technical updates at the Baidu World 2026 conference, scheduled for November 12. The event will feature the latest advancements in the company's full-stack AI architecture, known as the 'Chip-Cloud-Model' system, alongside demonstrations of the practical applications of the new OCR technology.
