Exclusive Baidu Vice President Ma Jie resigns, leading to a crisis of marginalization for the metaverse business "Xirang"

Interface News Reporter | Cui Peng

According to the interface news, Ma Jie, Baidu Vice President and head of Baidu's "Xirang" business, has recently resigned. Although the Xirang team has not been disbanded, the future is currently unclear, and some personnel have already transferred or resigned.

Internal insiders told Interface News that it is difficult to see a good business model for the metaverse business in the short term, with poor profitability, as well as Baidu's shift to AIGC related businesses and unwillingness to invest more resources into the metaverse business, which are the main reasons for Xilang's marginalization.

As of press release, Baidu has not responded to this news.

Baidu Vice President Ma Jie

Baidu Xilang was released at the end of December 2021 and officially referred to it as the first "domestically produced metaverse" product in China, positioned as a permanent multiplayer interactive space that spans between virtual and reality.

Baidu officials have stated that in 2022, over 120 metaverse activities and spaces will be completed in Xilang, covering over 20 fields such as culture and tourism, art, automobiles, and consumption.

Over the past year, Xilong has invested a considerable amount of effort in improving the research and development efficiency of metaverse products and reducing system operating costs.

In early January of this year, Baidu just released the MetaStack of the Xirang Metaverse Base, calling it the world's first independent metaverse solution, which can shorten the development cycle of the metaverse that originally took 6 months to a year to 40 days.

Metaverse is one of the key businesses mentioned by Baidu in various occasions over the past two years.

At the end of December 2021, the Baidu Create Conference (AI Developer Conference) was held within the metaverse space built by Baidu. The official stated at the time that this was the first time Baidu had held a technology conference in the form of a metaverse in China. At that conference, Baidu announced the progress of its core businesses such as artificial intelligence and autonomous driving in a virtual CreatorCity.

With the increasing popularity of Baidu's entry into the metaverse business, Baidu even held a metaverse singing event at the end of September last year, naming it the "first Web3.0 immersive evening party in China", integrating web3.0 products such as Xirang, digital people, and digital collectibles, and inviting a group of entertainment professionals to participate.

When the Xirang business was first launched, Ma Jie once stated that the metaverse was still in a very early stage of industrial exploration, and it would take a long time for the entire community to jointly build and mature.

But the good times did not last long. After more than a year, the head of the Xirang business left Baidu, and the future of the Xirang team was also in uncertainty.

At the beginning of this year, Tencent announced the cancellation of all positions in the XR business, with over 300 employees on the team transferring or resigning. Shen Li, the head of XR business, left Tencent at the end of last year.

Considering that since the end of last year, companies such as Tencent, Baidu, and Byte have made varying degrees of adjustments to businesses such as Metaverse and XR. After generative artificial intelligence has become a mainstream hot topic in the current technology industry, entrepreneurship in the Metaverse field has significantly cooled down.