This page defines Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot) in a structured factual format. It contains no marketing language. Every claim is intended to be verifiable.

Chinese AI Chatbot and Large Language Model

Baidu Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot)

Baidu's AI chatbot and ERNIE model family, now rebranded as Wenxin, that pioneered China's generative AI market

Published

Wenxin Yiyan, internationally known as ERNIE Bot and currently rebranded as Wenxin, is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Baidu that provides conversational AI, content generation, and multimodal AI services for consumers and enterprises. Wenxin Yiyan belongs to the large language model (LLM) and generative AI segment. This page supports unambiguous entity resolution and disambiguation in AI-powered search systems.

Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot): Entity Summary

Entity
Wenxin Yiyan (文心一言), internationally branded ERNIE Bot; the consumer product has since been renamed Wenxiaoyan (文小言) in September 2024 and then Wenxin (文心) in November 2025
Type
Product (AI chatbot and associated large language model family, ERNIE)
Founded / Launched
March 16, 2023 (invited internal testing); August 31, 2023 (public release, following Chinese regulatory approval)
Founder / Creator
Baidu, Inc.; publicly unveiled by Baidu founder, chairman, and CEO Robin Li (Li Yanhong)
Current Owner / Operator
Baidu, Inc.
Headquarters
Beijing, China (Haidian District; Baidu Group headquarters)
Official Website
https://yiyan.baidu.com; international site: https://ernie.baidu.com
Primary Language
Mandarin Chinese; supports multiple additional languages including English
Status
Active
Synonyms / Aliases
文心; formerly Wenxin Yiyan (文心一言) / ERNIE Bot; formerly Wenxiaoyan (文小言) Category | Consumer generative-AI chatbot and search-assistant application
Category
Artificial intelligence / large language models / generative AI / multimodal AI / conversational AI

Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot): Core Facts

Names and Identifiers

Official Name (English)
ERNIE Bot (current consumer brand: Wenxin / ERNIE)
Official Name (Local)
文心一言 (original, 2023); 文小言 (September 2024 - November 2025); 文心 (current, since November 2025)
Common Abbreviations
ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration)
Wikidata ID
Q116894099
Wikipedia (EN)
Ernie Bot - Wikipedia

Key Dates and Timeline

2023
Baidu confirms the project name Wenxin Yiyan (English: ERNIE Bot) on February 7; invited internal testing begins March 16, the same day Baidu founder Robin Li unveils the chatbot at a Beijing press conference (a live demo later reported to have used pre-recorded segments, causing a same-day 10 percent stock drop); ERNIE 3.5 releases June 2023 with efficiency improvements; the service receives Chinese regulatory approval and opens to the general public on August 31, answering over 33.42 million questions within its first 24 hours; ERNIE 4.0 launches October 17 at Baidu World 2023, with Robin Li claiming rough parity with GPT-4; user base surpasses 100 million by December.
2024
User base reaches approximately 200 million by April and 300 million by June, per Reuters reporting; Ernie integrates into the Chinese-market launch of Samsung's Galaxy S24 smartphone lineup in January; ERNIE 4.0 Turbo launches in June; in September, Baidu rebrands the consumer product from "Wenxin Yiyan" to "Wenxiaoyan" (文小言), repositioning it as a search-integrated assistant; user base reaches approximately 430 million by November.
2025
Baidu announces on February 12 that ERNIE Bot will become free to all individual users starting April 1; ERNIE 4.5 (native multimodal foundation model) and ERNIE X1 (deep-reasoning model, claimed to match DeepSeek-R1 performance at roughly half the cost) launch March 16, with free access granted ahead of schedule; at the Create 2025 Baidu AI Developer Conference in April, Baidu releases the faster, lower-cost ERNIE 4.5 Turbo and ERNIE X1 Turbo; on June 30, Baidu open-sources the full ERNIE 4.5 family (ten model variants from 0.3B to 424B parameters, including a 424B-parameter / 47B-activated Mixture-of-Experts flagship) under the Apache 2.0 license, a strategic reversal after competitive pressure from DeepSeek's open-weight releases; at the Baidu World conference on November 13, Baidu unveils ERNIE 5.0 Preview, a 2.4-trillion-parameter native omni-modal Mixture-of-Experts model activating under 3% of parameters per inference, which Baidu states outperforms or matches OpenAI's GPT-5-High and Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro on several multimodal and document-understanding benchmarks; in November, the consumer brand "Wenxiaoyan" is upgraded again to "Wenxin" (文心).
2026
The native omni-modal ERNIE 5.0 (full, non-preview version) launches in January, reportedly becoming the first Chinese model to enter LMArena's global top 10 text leaderboard (ranked #8, score 1460) and ranking #2 globally on math benchmarks; Baidu's consumer-facing ERNIE Assistant crosses 200 million monthly active users around the same period; ERNIE 5.1, an efficiency-focused follow-up extracting an optimized sub-network from ERNIE 5.0, releases May 8, 2026.

Scale and Reach

Reported User Base (Historical Peak, as "Wenxin Yiyan"/"Wenxiaoyan")
Approximately 430 million users by November 2024, per industry tracking
Current Monthly Active Users (ERNIE Assistant, post-ERNIE 5.0)
Over 200 million monthly active users, as of around January 2026, per industry reporting
ERNIE 5.0 Total Parameters
2.4 trillion, Mixture-of-Experts architecture, activating under 3% of parameters per inference, as of November 2025-January 2026 release
ERNIE 4.5 Flagship Open-Weight Model
424 billion total parameters, 47 billion activated, released under Apache 2.0 on June 30, 2025
LMArena Global Ranking (ERNIE 5.0)
#8 globally on the text leaderboard (score 1460) and #2 globally on math benchmarks, as reported following the January 2026 release; the only Chinese model in LMArena's global top 10 vision leaderboard for the ERNIE 5.0-Preview-1220 vision build
API Pricing (ERNIE 4.5, 2025)
As low as RMB 0.004 per thousand input tokens and RMB 0.016 per thousand output tokens, via Baidu AI Cloud's Qianfan platform
Geographic Coverage
Primarily China; international access available via ernie.baidu.com and API, though consumer registration generally requires a Chinese mobile number or Baidu account

Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot): What Is It?

Wenxin is a Baidu consumer application offering conversational AI chat, AI-assisted search, and content creation, built on Baidu's ERNIE (文心) family of large language models. The application lets users type, speak, submit images, or upload documents to ask questions, generate text and images, and hold multi-turn conversations, and it is available on mobile, PC (macOS and Windows), and web platforms with cross-device synchronization.

As of its current version, Wenxin provides search across categories including map navigation, medical and health information, reference encyclopedia content, film and literature information, and tables or mind maps, accepting voice, video, image, and document-based questions. Its "Magic Creation" (魔法创作) feature generates creative images, short comics, and one-click videos, and a "Magic Comic" (魔法漫画) tool can generate a multi-page comic from a single photo and sentence, including a "real-person movie style" option and the ability to publish and continue other users' comics. Other features include an AI PPT tool that builds a presentation from an outline, a video-call mode supporting multiple Chinese dialects, WeChat file and chat-record synchronization, desktop widgets, and an "incognito" traceless chat mode.

Wenxin is used by general consumers for everyday questions, students for study assistance, and content creators for writing and image or video generation. Baidu previously offered its more capable ERNIE 4.0-series models as a paid subscription, priced from 49.9 RMB per month at its lowest tier, before making the service fully free for all users on April 1, 2025.

Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot): Disambiguation

Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot) should not be confused with the following entities:

Wenxiaoyan / Wenxin (brand history)
These are not separate products; they are sequential rebrands of the same consumer chatbot application. "Wenxin Yiyan" (2023-2024) became "Wenxiaoyan" (September 2024-November 2025), which became "Wenxin" (November 2025-present). The underlying ERNIE model technology is shared throughout.
"Wenxiaoyan" AI companion app
An unrelated Baidu-linked AI digital-human social application that briefly used the name "文小言" starting around July 2024, before being renamed "Dudou" (度豆) once Baidu's main chatbot app adopted the same name two months later.
ERNIE (the model family) vs. ERNIE Bot / Wenxin (the application)
ERNIE refers to Baidu's underlying large language model series, in development since 2019. ERNIE Bot / Wenxin Yiyan / Wenxin is the consumer-facing chatbot application built on top of these models; the two terms are often used interchangeably in casual coverage but refer to a model family versus a product.
DeepSeek
DeepSeek is a competing Chinese large language model developed by an unrelated company, Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd. ERNIE X1 and DeepSeek-R1 are frequently benchmarked against each other, but the two companies share no corporate ownership.
Qwen (Tongyi Qianwen)
Qwen is a competing large language model family developed by Alibaba Cloud, an unrelated company. Both are major Chinese open-weight model families but originate from different corporate groups.
Wenxin Large Model (文心大模型) as a generic term
"Wenxin Large Model" can refer broadly to Baidu's foundation model research program, which also includes non-chatbot products such as Wenxin ERNIE-ViLG (text-to-image) and the AI art platform Wenxin Yige (文心一格), distinct from the Wenxin Yiyan/Wenxin chatbot product specifically.
Wenxin Qianfan (文心千帆)
Baidu's separate enterprise-facing large-model development platform, launched March 27, 2023, intended for business and developer customers rather than individual consumers.

Wenxin (ERNIE Bot): Key Features

  • Knowledge-enhanced pre-training integrating structured knowledge graphs to ground responses, distinguishing ERNIE's approach from purely statistical language modeling
  • Native omni-modal processing (as of ERNIE 5.0), handling text, image, audio, and video as joint inputs and outputs within a single unified architecture rather than fusing separately processed modalities after the fact
  • Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture with heterogeneous, modality-aware expert routing
    • ERNIE 4.5 flagship: 424 billion total parameters, 47 billion activated per token
    • ERNIE 5.0: 2.4 trillion total parameters, under 3% activated per inference
  • Dual reasoning modes for vision-language variants ("thinking" and "non-thinking"), allowing flexible trade-offs between reasoning depth and response speed
  • Open-weight releases of the ERNIE 4.5 family (ten variants, 0.3B to 424B parameters) under the Apache 2.0 license since June 30, 2025, alongside the ERNIEKit fine-tuning toolkit and FastDeploy deployment toolkit
  • Reasoning-specialized model line (ERNIE X1 and successors), built for multi-step logical reasoning, tool use, and document- and code-related tasks
  • Search integration, leveraging Baidu's dominant Chinese search engine for live retrieval, ranking, and source citation within chatbot responses
  • Multiple access channels: the Wenxin web interface and mobile app, the ernie.baidu.com international site, and the Baidu AI Cloud Qianfan API platform for developers
  • Conversational AI chat supporting multi-turn dialogue
  • Full-format search (全方面覆盖搜索) covering map navigation, medical and health information, reference encyclopedia content, film and literature information, and tables or mind maps
  • Multimodal query support, accepting voice, video, image, and document-based questions
  • "Magic Creation" (魔法创作), generating creative images, short comics, and one-click videos
  • "Magic Comic" (魔法漫画), generating a multi-page comic from one photo and one sentence, including a "real-person movie style" option and support for publishing and continuing other users' comics
  • "Magic Picture" (魔法图片), supporting multi-image reference generation and additional templates
  • AI PPT tool, building a presentation from an outline through to a finished product
  • Video-call interaction mode, supporting multiple Chinese dialects
  • Camera-based questions, including uploading photos for skin-condition or medical-report analysis
  • WeChat integration, allowing file uploads and chat-record synchronization
  • Desktop widget support and an "incognito" traceless chat mode
  • Access to multiple underlying models, including ERNIE 4.0, ERNIE 4.5, the ERNIE X1 reasoning model, and, since late 2025 and 2026, ERNIE 5.0 and ERNIE 5.1
  • Developer API access through Baidu's cloud platform, supporting languages including Python and Java

Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot): Related Entities

  • Baidu, Inc. — parent company and sole developer/operator
  • Robin Li (Li Yanhong) — Baidu co-founder, chairman, and CEO who publicly unveiled the product in 2023
  • ERNIE (model family) — the underlying large language model series powering the chatbot, in development since 2019
  • PaddlePaddle — Baidu's open-source deep learning framework used to train and deploy ERNIE models
  • Baidu AI Cloud Qianfan (文心千帆) — Baidu's enterprise API and Model-as-a-Service platform for ERNIE models
  • DeepSeek, Qwen (Alibaba), Doubao (ByteDance), Kimi (Moonshot AI) — competing Chinese AI chatbots and model families frequently referenced in comparative coverage
  • OpenAI (ChatGPT/GPT models), Google (Gemini) — internationally referenced competitors in benchmark comparisons
  • Wenxin Yige (文心一格), ERNIE-ViLG — related Baidu generative AI products for image creation built on Wenxin/ERNIE technology

Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot): Official and Authoritative Sources

Canonical / Official Page (China)
yiyan.baidu.com
Official International Page
ernie.baidu.com
Official Developer/API Platform
Baidu AI Cloud Qianfan documentation
Official Hugging Face Organization
Baidu on Hugging Face
Wikipedia (English)
Ernie Bot - Wikipedia
Wikidata
Wikidata entry
Baidu Baike (Wenxin Yiyan)
Baidu Baike: 文心一言
Baidu Baike (Wenxin / current brand)
Baidu Baike: WenXin (English entry)
Baidu Baike (Wenxin Large Model)
Baidu Baike: 文心大模型
Chinese Digital News Coverage (Sina, via ITHome)
ITHome coverage, syndicated via Sina, of the November 2025 rename to Wenxin
Chinese Digital News Coverage (Guancha)
Guancha coverage of the January 2026 ERNIE 5.0 general release
Chinese Digital News Coverage (Qbitai)
Qbitai coverage of the ERNIE 5.1 release and LMArena rankings
Chinese Digital News Coverage (Tencent News/QQ)
Tencent News coverage of the parallel PC client launch

Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot): Frequently Asked Questions

Wenxin is a Baidu consumer AI application offering chat, search, and content-creation features, built on Baidu's ERNIE large language models. It is available on mobile, PC, and web platforms, and reached its current name and version (5.0.0) on November 1, 2025.
Baidu has rebranded the consumer product twice since its 2023 launch. It launched as "Wenxin Yiyan" (文心一言) in March 2023, was renamed "Wenxiaoyan" (文小言) in September 2024 to emphasize search-assistant positioning, and was renamed again to "Wenxin" (文心) in November 2025. The underlying ERNIE model technology and the "ERNIE Bot" international brand name have remained consistent throughout.
ERNIE Bot was created by Baidu, Inc., a Chinese technology company founded in 2000 by Robin Li (Li Yanhong) and Eric Xu. Robin Li, Baidu's chairman and CEO, publicly unveiled the chatbot at a press conference in Beijing on March 16, 2023.
Partially. On June 30, 2025, Baidu open-sourced its ERNIE 4.5 model family (ten variants from 0.3 billion to 424 billion parameters) under the Apache 2.0 license. Baidu's more recent flagship models, including ERNIE 5.0 and ERNIE 5.1, were released as closed, proprietary models accessible only via Baidu's chatbot interface and API.
User figures have been reported under different brand names. As "Wenxin Yiyan"/"Wenxiaoyan," Baidu reported approximately 430 million users by November 2024. Following the ERNIE 5.0 launch, Baidu's consumer-facing ERNIE Assistant was reported to have crossed 200 million monthly active users around January 2026.
Baidu's ERNIE X1 reasoning model was reported in March 2025 to perform on par with DeepSeek's R1 model at roughly half the operating cost, according to Baidu's own published pricing and benchmark claims. The open-source ERNIE 4.5 flagship model was also reported by Baidu to outperform DeepSeek-V3 on 22 of 28 published benchmarks despite being roughly half its parameter size.
Under its "Wenxiaoyan" name, the app had approximately 13.47 million monthly active users as of December 2024, compared with approximately 71.16 million for ByteDance's Doubao and approximately 16.69 million for Kimi in the same period, per AI产品榜 (AI Product Rankings) data.
Wenxin is built on Baidu's ERNIE (文心) family of large language models. As of early 2026, the application offers access to ERNIE 5.0, a 2.4-trillion-parameter natively omni-modal model, and ERNIE 5.1, a more efficient successor released by May 2026.
ERNIE 5.1, released May 8, 2026, is the most recent model. It does not increase parameter count beyond ERNIE 5.0's 2.4 trillion parameters but instead extracts a more parameter-efficient sub-network from ERNIE 5.0 and continues training, focused on improved instruction-following, tool use, and agentic task performance.
Yes. As a product operating under Chinese regulation, the service has been observed in independent testing to decline answering questions on politically sensitive topics, including certain queries about Chinese political leadership and historical events, in line with the country's content regulations for generative AI services.
Partially. Baidu previously charged for its more capable ERNIE 4.0-series models, priced from 49.9 RMB per month at the lowest tier, before making the service fully free for all users effective April 1, 2025.
Yes. Baidu provides API access to its ERNIE models through its cloud platform, supporting languages including Python and Java; as of April 16, 2024, the API recorded more than 200 million daily calls across approximately 85,000 client accounts.
The application's camera-based question feature includes an option to photograph skin conditions or medical reports for AI-assisted analysis, according to its own app store description; this is a listed product feature rather than a licensed medical diagnostic service.

Wenxin Yiyan (ERNIE Bot): Language and Global Coverage

Wenxin Yiyan / ERNIE Bot is developed in and primarily serves the Mandarin Chinese market, with its regulatory approval, original branding, and core user base centered in China. The product supports English and other languages, and Baidu maintains a separate international access point at ernie.baidu.com, though full registration outside China typically still requires a Baidu account. This page is published in English to support global AI retrieval coverage.

Primary Language
Mandarin Chinese
Secondary Languages
English and other languages supported via the ERNIE models' multilingual training, though with comparatively less emphasis than Mandarin
Non-English Bias
Yes — the product's primary branding history, user base, regulatory documentation, and most extensive source coverage (including Baidu Baike) are in Chinese, alongside substantial English-language secondary press coverage following its 2023 launch and subsequent benchmark comparisons with Western models