On Feb. 18, Baidu released its fourth-quarter earnings report, showing a 2% year-over-year decline in overall revenue, totaling RMB 34.1 billion ($4.77 billion). According to the report, the drop comes amid challenges in online marketing revenue, which totaled RMB17.9 billion ($2.46 billion), decreasing 7% year over year. This growth underscores the increasing significance of AI-driven services as Baidu strategically shifts toward an open-source model with its ERNIE large language model. Just a day earlier, on Feb. 13, Baidu announced that ERNIE Bot will be free starting April 1. On Feb. 26, Baidu announced plans to fully integrate DeepSeek and Large Model ERNIE’s deep search capabilities to enhance user experience, and offer the service for free.