Baidu Wenxin: sharp growth in activity during Chinese New Year

Wenxin Baidu entered the holiday season with impressive figures: a fourfold increase in monthly active users in just a few weeks. This is not merely a marketing breakthrough — it's a signal that generative AI is ceasing to be a tool for enthusiasts and becoming an everyday service for millions of Chinese users. Data that Baidu published in early February shows that creative functions of the neural network — image and video generation — are causing people far greater excitement than text services.

The context of this explosion is easy to understand. The entire month of February in China is holiday bustle around the Chinese New Year. Families create greeting cards, select gifts, and share content on social media. Baidu launched an attractive offer with New Year bonuses that coincided with peak demand for creative functions. This is not coincidence, but precise calculation: when people are looking for a quick way to create a fun greeting card or amusing video, they are ready to install a new app and spend time learning it.

The most impressive result was shown by the image generation function: a fifty-fold increase in calls. This means that if previously image generation through Wenxin accounted for a few thousand requests per day, during the holiday promotion their quantity exceeded hundreds of thousands. Video generation demonstrated a slightly more modest result — a forty-fold increase, but this is still an astronomical figure for a comparatively young service. These numbers speak to the fact that Chinese users have finally dared to try AI tools not for work, but for entertainment and creativity.

Far more interesting appears to be the fourfold growth of the intelligent calls feature. This is not content generation in the classical sense — it's full-fledged real-time interaction between a human and AI through voice. Growth of this service points to the popularity of intelligent virtual assistants among Chinese users. Whether it's help organizing a holiday, clarifying information for gifts, or simple conversation — people trust AI and readily interact with it by voice.

What does this mean for the industry? First, Baidu demonstrates that there is no resistance to generative AI in China — on the contrary, consumers are actively adapting it when the service is convenient and accessible. Second, the company proves that you can compete with global AI market leaders on your own territory if you offer a localized, user-friendly product with the right marketing strategy. Third, these figures point to growing attention from Chinese users to creative functions rather than text work.

However, Baidu's figures should be interpreted carefully. A fourfold increase in MAU during a holiday promotion does not guarantee that most of these users will return to the service in March. The challenge for the company is to convert the holiday spike into long-term engagement. Nevertheless, the very fact that tens of millions of Chinese users tried Wenxin already pushes the generative AI market in the Asian region forward. Baidu has created a critical mass of users, and now everything depends on whether the company can retain them through quality, innovation, and convenience. If it succeeds, this could become the starting point for deeper penetration of AI technologies into the everyday life of Chinese consumers.