Baidu's ERNIE Consolidation: Too Tidy, Too Late
Baidu has merged its three fragmented ERNIE AI interfaces — ERNIE Bot, Wen Xiaoyan, and Baidu ERNIE Assistant — into a single portal at chat.baidu.com, ending years of confusing brand overlap caused by siloed internal teams. The cleanup is overdue but arrives as Baidu's consumer AI position has already weakened significantly, with ERNIE App at roughly 5 million DAU against ByteDance's Doubao at over 140 million. For PMs, the story is a case study in how organizational structure, not model quality, can determine product fate.