Jin Lei Yang Jing was sent from Oufei Temple Qubits reports | Official account QbitAI
The high investment in research and development is Baidu's long-term jianghu design.
With its technical advantages that year, Baidu surpassed Google to become the first search engine in China, laying the foundation for BAT's position.
Now Baidu, R & D investment has reached an average of 64 million yuan per day. And this continuous investment in research and development has also made Baidu undergo a new transformation.
Just now, Robin Li announced in his Q3 earnings letter:
Baidu became the world's largest provider of autonomous mobility services.
This is a very noteworthy signal.
As the direction of Baidu's long-term bet, the future travel ecology with autonomous driving as the core is believed to be very likely to derive a trillion-level huge market.
And the imagination about Baidu may not be limited to this.
Today's newly disclosed Q3 financial report shows that Baidu invested 6.2 billion yuan in research and development, accounting for 19% of total revenue.
Looking at the global technology giants, 7% and 8% are still normal investment intensities, and more than 10% of the investment accounts for only a few.
To lengthen the timeline, Baidu R&D has invested 17.6 billion yuan this year, accounting for more than 18% of revenue, and has reached 90% of last year's annual investment.
Ken invested so much money in research and development, on the one hand, Baidu is a technical benchmark recognized by the industry, and the repeated hard scientific and technological breakthroughs are not unrelated to input costs.
On the other hand, in terms of identifying long-term value, Baidu's fierce method and large stakes have long been the clear wind direction that Baidu has revealed internally and externally in recent years.
This year, Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li has proposed eight key technologies more than once.
Autonomous driving, machine translation, biocomputing, deep learning frameworks, digital city operations, knowledge management, AI chips, and personal intelligence assistants.
In this Q3 financial report, it also more or less revealed the research progress, which specifically shows Baidu's two core research and development - intelligent driving and Baidu intelligent cloud.
Let's start with smart driving.
As an industry leader, this quarter not only ensures the stable development of fundamentals, but also explores the industry.
Road test, Apollo test fleet size has reached 500 vehicles, in nearly 30 cities around the world to open road test, the total mileage of more than 16 million kilometers, access to 411 automatic driving test licenses. It is the only Chinese enterprise in the world that has realized the accumulation of 10 million kilometers of road testing. At present, Apollo's daily mileage is 40,000 kilometers, which is equivalent to testing the earth once a day.
Other explorations, Baidu set a precedent for "building trucks", and jointly created the L3-level intelligent electric heavy-duty truck "Xingtu 1 generation" with Shiqiao; the automotive robot unveiled at the Baidu World Congress and the first unmanned travel App in China.
As for Baidu's AI set-up, Baidu Intelligent Cloud, it is also fully blooming in deep learning, AI chips, knowledge management, and smart cities.
The core engine Baidu Brain evolved to version 7.0. Compared with the previous version, four-fold fusion innovation, knowledge and deep learning fusion, cross-modal multi-technology fusion, technology and scene fusion, and software and hardware integration are added, so as to achieve cross-modal deep semantic understanding of complex real scenes.
In terms of AI chips, Kunlun Core 2 has achieved mass production. It adopts a 7nm process and is equipped with a self-developed second-generation XPU architecture, which is 2-3 times higher than the performance of the first generation. It can be applied to commercialization fields such as the Internet, smart cities, and smart industries, and will also empower cutting-edge spaces such as computer clusters, biocomputing, intelligent transportation, and unmanned driving.
In the smart city, the search results of the national patent database "City Brain" show that the number of baidu smart city patent applications and authorizations ranks first in China. In the industry, Baidu is also the only enterprise with more than 500 patents in the field of smart cities.
Baidu also integrated the big model with the knowledge graph, released the knowledge enhancement big model ERNIE3.0 with tens of billions of parameters, and refreshed 54 Chinese NLP task benchmarks in one fell swoop.
In terms of personal intelligent assistants, Baidu released a new generation of dialogue generation model PLATO-XL, which is also the world's first 10 billion parameters Chinese and English dialogue pre-training generation model.
……
In fact, Baidu's investment in technology research and development in recent years has maintained a steady growth trend. Even as the pace of commercialization of AI accelerates, this trend is even more pronounced:
In the last quarter, R&D investment reached 6.3 billion, an increase of 30% year-on-year; the amount of R&D invested this year has reached 90% of last year's 19.5 billion; the proportion of recent R&D investment has been more than 18%.
It can be clear that what supports Baidu's high investment and new business development is still the stable growth of the basic disk behind it.
Prior to the release of the Q3 financial report, the market expected Baidu's revenue for this quarter to be 31.814 billion yuan, an increase of 13% compared with Q3 2020.
However, from the data of this financial report, the overall revenue increased by 13% year-on-year, exceeding market expectations.
So, similarly, does the high investment in research and development play a role in promoting solid growth on the basic disk?
In terms of specific AI tracks, Baidu announced the revenue of Baidu's intelligent cloud in the third quarter financial report: an increase of 73% year-on-year.
In the second quarter of this year, Baidu Intelligent Cloud increased by 71% year-on-year, and has achieved two consecutive quarters of growth.
At the same time, Baidu's chief financial officer Luo Rong also said:
Driven by cloud and other AI businesses, Baidu's core non-advertising revenue was RMB5.2 billion in the quarter. Baidu's intelligent cloud drives Baidu's core revenue to achieve good results again.
In addition, Robin Li also specifically pointed out in the financial report letter:
Behind the rapid growth of Baidu's autonomous driving business is the long-term and firm maintenance of high-intensity research and development investment. The intensity of R&D investment continues to be at the forefront of the world's largest technology companies. Benefiting from R&D investment, Baidu ushered in a number of fruitful results in the third quarter in terms of "two bases and one bottom", that is, basic research, basic technology and underlying innovation.
More industry experts pointed out that with Waymo, the world's top player of autonomous driving, Baidu Apollo is significantly ahead in the key order volume indicators.
This also means that Baidu has become the world's first in the field of large-scale operation of autonomous driving.
It can be seen that Baidu's high-R&D AI business has played a role in "feeding back" under the blessing of the basic disk stability.
High-tech research and development has become everyone's first impression of Baidu.
Last year (2020) Baidu's revenue exceeded 100 billion, and core research and development expenses accounted for 21.4% of revenue.
In the scope of the top 500 private enterprises in the country, Baidu's proportion ranks first, and it is 2.3 percentage points higher than the second place.
If the timeline is stretched longer, Baidu has maintained an average of more than 15% of its annual R&D investment in revenue in the past 10 years.
For the unremitting smashing of money to research and development, Baidu's explanation is:
AI is the engine for long-term growth.
From the perspective of the development process of AI, AI is now entering the landing period, and enterprises are expected to achieve large-scale landing and revenue.
For Baidu, it has taken the lead in commercialization in some areas and realized the diversified layout of AI business.
Intelligent cloud services. According to the "Tracking of China's Public Cloud Service Market (First Half of 2021)" released by IDC, Baidu Intelligent Cloud ranks among the four clouds of Chinese technology companies, with a growth rate higher than the average growth rate of the market and the greatest potential for sustained growth.
Intelligent transportation. As of September 2021, the number of cities covered by Baidu ACE Intelligent Transportation signing tens of millions of orders has increased to 24, a three-fold increase year-on-year.
In terms of smart devices, Xiaodu continues to lead the smart home device market. According to data from a number of institutions, in the second quarter of this year, Xiaodu ranked first in the global smart screen shipments and China's smart speaker shipments.
Autonomous mobility services. According to the financial report, radish run provided 115,000 rides in the Q3 quarter, and the number of unmanned car travel orders increased by 1 times month-on-month, and users in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Changsha, Cangzhou and other places can experience it.
Once it begins to enter the stage of large-scale revenue, Baidu will suddenly add several new industry-level engines.
For example, the fastest and best development of autonomous driving, and then the rapid deployment of digital city operations relying on intelligent clouds... These are among Baidu's plans.
For automatic driving, Robin Li emphasized this time:
Relying on long-term and determined to maintain high-intensity R&D investment, Baidu has become the world's largest provider of self-driving travel services.
From a macro perspective, the concept of artificial intelligence has been proposed for 60 years, and now it is no longer as simple as a technology.
Under the premise of the continuous precipitation and accumulation of big data, computing power and algorithms in the past decade, artificial intelligence has the conditions to lift its feet to a "new level".
What the new generation of artificial intelligence is changing is our economy, society and way of life, and more deeply, the production relationship and development model.
McKinsey also predicts that by 2030, artificial intelligence could contribute an additional $13 trillion to global GDP.
PwC also said that 26.1% of China's GDP will benefit from the contribution of artificial intelligence.
Therefore, China included artificial intelligence in one of the seven major areas of new infrastructure last year, and the importance attached to it can be seen.
In such an environment, the digital economy is evolving to a new stage of intelligent economy driven by artificial intelligence.
Digital transformation is gradually becoming the development trend of enterprises in China and even the world.
For example, the list of "2021 China's Top 500 Private Enterprises" released by the All-China Federation of Industry and Commerce emphasized:
About 90% of the top 500 private enterprises have implemented or plan to implement digital transformation.
But on the other hand, it is also very obvious that the battle with AI as the "main bone" is bound to be a long-term protracted war.
As Wu Hequan, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, said:
Artificial intelligence is a general technology, social life and all walks of life are the stage where artificial intelligence can play a role, people are generally optimistic about its prospects, so the research on artificial intelligence is not reduced. In the face of this technology, we must not rush to make quick gains, but must accumulate strength for the long-distance running of artificial intelligence.
It can be seen that digitalization and intelligence are the needs of the country and the direction of the times.
Baidu has had the highlight of the "BAT era", and now with the opportunities of AI and intelligence, it has begun to show the opportunities of "Baidu in the era", becoming China's head goose and national team representative in the fields of cutting-edge technology and intelligence.
Baidu's expressions inside and out in recent years are no longer limited to Baidu itself.
Industrial intelligence, AI era, star sea... Innovative Chinese time.
None of them no longer send such a signal -
The reason why Baidu has repositioned technology is not only its own choice, but also hopes to carry the mission of the times.
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