Former Google DeepMind staff engineer Qiyin Wu has joined Baidu to lead work related to large-model pretraining, according to a news flash published by BlockBeats. The report said Wu remains based in the United States after taking the role. Wu previously worked on Gemini and was described as a core contributor to Gemini 2.5 Flash and Gemini 2.5 Pro. BlockBeats also said Wu is likely the researcher previously revealed earlier this month under the internal alias "Wu Qin." At that time, Baidu BMU head Sun Tianxiang told staff that the company had recruited a researcher from a Frontier Lab in North America. The internal note said that person had taken part in the development of multiple generations of large models over the past two years and would join the team in strengthening ERNIE's pretraining capabilities. The latest report links that earlier disclosure to Wu.