My Mom Won't Let Me Hang Out with Baidu Dazi

"Pure Deadweight"

After two days of heavy strategic pieces, today we're taking a break to write about Baidu Dazi.

I first noticed Baidu's office Agent because Baidu Dazi's go-to-market strategy is a bit ahead of its time — it mainly relies on riding other people's coattails.

LatePost published The AI Office Wars of Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance. Baidu apparently got a little anxious, and promptly placed a sponsored piece titled Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent Reunite in AI Office — Data Is the Deciding Factor.

I genuinely burst out laughing when I saw it. ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencent fighting over office software, and Baidu still manages to crash the party like this.

Baidu probably still thinks it's the B in BAT, when it's actually long been the B in B2B. Don't get me wrong, I'm not insulting anyone — I mean Baidu's revenue now comes from enterprise clients. It's a healthy B2B company.

That's not even the end of it. With Workbuddy going viral recently, Baidu immediately spun up Competing on Growth and Delivery — Where Do the Twin Champions of AI Office Go Next?

The main thesis: Workbuddy and Baidu Dazi are the "twin champions" of AI office. After crashing the three-way office Agent showdown, now it wants to force a two-horse race with Workbuddy. Whoever invented this PR playbook is a genius.

iQIYI first to support. So how is Baidu Dazi, actually?

Not sure if my last piece on ERNIE Bot got me blacklisted — several tasks in a row returned "model invocation failed," and paying for membership didn't help. I had to uninstall and reinstall.

Once I finally got it working, let's just say it matched the stereotype:

I asked Baidu Dazi to turn the recording of a Zhipu earnings call into show notes. It did a whole round of analysis, and then the timeline just stopped at 8 minutes. The audio is 50 minutes long.

Nailing the cosplay of a worker who saves themselves the effort 👍

Then I gave Baidu Dazi a Skill, asking it to use the browser to sync my draft to Substack. After some deliberation, it told me I hadn't downloaded that browser.

Next I tested the trendy 3D feature. I gave it a picture of Doubao and asked it to generate a printable 3D model from the uploaded photo.

As for the result... let's just say it was an angle I never could have imagined.

Baidu Dazi doesn't show the model version either, and now I'm starting to suspect this thing is genuinely plugged into ERNIE Bot. What a waste of emotional energy.

But out of respect for Doubao, I still printed the thing on my Bambu Lab.

Doubao's likeness, forever preserved. Baidu, you're done for — once AGI arrives, Doubao is coming to unplug your ethernet cable.

Finally, I asked Baidu Dazi to imitate the Moonshot AI promo video and make one for Doubao. The final result:

It has basically nothing to do with the original — looks a bit like a PowerPoint animation, possibly directed by the guy behind Pure Hearts: Into Chinese Showbiz.

To be fair, it's passable at making presentation decks and converting Word to PDF — if that's mainly what white-collar work is...

But this "expert suite" also left me speechless. What's the meaning of putting the "self-media suite" in such a prominent spot? Is Baidu Dazi meant purely for content creators?

The product managers on this team give me the impression that their main job is writing Skills.

I feel like Baidu Dazi could take over Doubao's drooling-on-the-sidelines ecological niche in this version of the office Agent race — though that's honestly a bit too insulting to Doubao.

Baidu Dazi also bought a bunch of placements unilaterally declaring the end of its internal horse race, which is complete nonsense. Because as far as I can tell, Kuku AI shows zero sign of wrapping up.

Some background for everyone: Baidu Dazi belongs to the AI Cloud division, while Kuku AI belongs to the Baidu Netdisk/Wenku division — two teams that refuse to defer to each other.

Internal horse racing at Alibaba and Tencent, fine — they have the capital to waste. But Baidu looks like it's about to get lapped, and it's still holding internal races here? Best of luck to both brothers.

That said, compared to Baidu Dazi, Kuku AI has at least one redeeming quality: it lets you pick your model. There's no Qwen or Hunyuan (not sure if that's to avoid padding a rival's KPIs), but at least you know ERNIE isn't mixed in. And it very tactfully put ERNIE 5.1 dead last.

Meanwhile, at a time when every office Agent defaults to launching on startup to juice DAU, Kuku AI thoughtfully handed the launch-on-startup toggle to me.

A pure tribute to Baidu Netdisk, whose download speeds fly even without a membership 👍

But Baidu Dazi wins big on pricing — it's the first to go 9.9 yuan a month. The price war no one else dares to fight, it fights.

I think this pricing is very clever, because almost nobody will seriously use Baidu Dazi — all the unused credits become pure profit.

Sound familiar? As expected from a company that invested in LibTV. I hereby declare Baidu Dazi the first adopter of the Almighty's gym-membership playbook.

Honestly, Baidu Dazi might as well just go completely free. Even wide open, hardly anyone would use it, and it could pad DAU — everyone gets promoted together, hand in hand.

Baidu Dazi could also try to claim the ecological niche of the month-end Agent.

Month-end Agent is a concept I just invented: users spend the start of the month on Claude Code and Codex, mid-month on Qwen Office and Doubao Work, and the end of the month on Honor of Kings' Lingbao and Baidu Dazi.

I'm kidding — Baidu Dazi might not even beat Honor of Kings' Lingbao.

For those who don't game: Lingbao is Honor of Kings' AI assistant, and it can also explain things clearly.

The great office Agent war is about to break out. Say Tencent, ByteDance, or Alibaba will win, and a crowd will rush to argue — Tencent is lazy, ByteDance is closed-off, Alibaba infighting — but say Baidu Dazi will win, and the room fills with cheerful laughter.

That's right — studying Baidu Dazi is the real serious business.

No wonder Baidu is anxious, because ever since AI arrived, every product has been eating into Baidu Search's market share. Chatbots are eating it, office Agents are eating it. The one certain outcome of the Tencent-Alibaba-ByteDance brawl is that even fewer people will use Baidu Search.

How does one even say with a straight face that ERNIE Bot's overall capabilities rank first in China

So when I still hear people say things like "Baidu's high-growth AI assets are consistently undervalued by traditional internet valuation frameworks, and a single P/E multiple completely obscures the standalone value of each business segment" — I'm deeply impressed, and I suggest the company pay that person's salary in Baidu stock.

My favorite comment about Baidu doing office Agents: they woke up early and still missed the market — imagine if they'd woken up late.

Oh right, does anyone remember Baidu's Miaoda? With ERNIE Kuaima being folded into Baidu Dazi, that thing is probably getting merged too — same diagnosis: dead on arrival.

Sharing the same roadside ecosystem as Baidu Dazi is Nano Work — from search, to lobster, to comic dramas, to now office Agents. I've never seen this company miss a single chance to jump on a trend. Pure treat-the-product-like-a-media-account energy 👍

Of course, Baidu doing office Agents isn't entirely without value. Just like when we proposed establishing an ERNIE Bot history museum — mainly so ByteDance, Alibaba, and the other model labs can learn the lesson and not end up like Baidu — Baidu Dazi plays the role of a reference point in this office Agent war.

Because right now, office Agents all love buying traffic, and certain products especially love telling stories about being top-two in MAU, number one in growth rate.

In the early days of a ranking, the fact that Baidu can still buy its way up means competition hasn't reached white-hot intensity yet.

When Robin realizes buying traffic is a pure joke — or when Baidu Dazi's DAU asymptotically approaches ERNIE Bot's DAU from this spring, and buying traffic stops working entirely — that's when you'll know the real war has begun.

In other words, the fall of Baidu Dazi will mark the opening of the office Agent war. Magnificent 👍

(This article's cover was generated by ChatGPT; the writing is purely human.)

This Friday at 8 PM, we'll be joined by Fu Cheng, former head of product at MuleRun, to roast the big-tech Agent wars. Come watch.

⬇️

Subscribe to our Substack: funeralai.substack.com