China’s Generative AI Landscape 2024: 2.3 B Users and Baidu’s Dominance

On November 30, the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) published the "2024 Generative AI Application Development Report". The survey shows that by June 2024, the user base of generative AI products in China reached 2.3 billion people, accounting for 16.4% of the total population.

Baidu’s Wenxin Yiyan currently holds the highest usage rate among domestic generative AI products, with an 11.5% share.

Wenxin Yiyan is Baidu’s generative AI offering built on the Wenxin large model. Since its launch on March 16, 2023, the model has undergone continuous upgrades, adding knowledge enhancement, retrieval enhancement, and autonomous agents. Public data indicates that by November 2024, the Wenxin model receives 1.5 billion daily calls and processes over 1.7 trillion tokens, a 30‑fold increase compared with a year earlier.

The CNNIC report highlights that dialogue‑type products dominate the market, occupying 62% of the share due to their broad applicability. Approximately one‑third of users employ generative AI as an office assistant to boost productivity, while about 30% use it for leisure, entertainment, and content creation.

In the content‑creation sector, large models are playing an expanding role. Baidu Wenku has rebuilt its platform on the Wenxin model to become a "one‑stop AI content acquisition and creation platform," offering intelligent PPT, writing, mind‑mapping, research reports, image‑to‑text generation, and hundreds of multimodal AI capabilities. By October 2024, the AI functions in Baidu Wenku had been used more than 2.8 billion times.