Robin Li: Baidu has become the world's largest provider of self-driving travel services

On November 17, Baidu released its unaudited financial report for the third quarter of 2021. During the reporting period, Baidu achieved revenue of 31.9 billion yuan and net profit attributable to Baidu (non-US GAAP) of 5.09 billion yuan. In a letter released on the same day, Baidu Chairman and CEO Robin Li said that with long-term and firm investment in research and development, Baidu has become the world's largest provider of autonomous travel services.

　　According to the letter of all employees, in the third quarter of this year, Baidu Apollo accumulated more than 16 million kilometers of test mileage at the L4 level, an increase of 189% year-on-year, and obtained 411 automatic driving test licenses, an increase of 237 year-on-year. At present, Baidu Apollo has grown into the world's most active autonomous driving open platform, with more than 210 global ecological partners, 65,000 global developers, and 700,000 open source code lines.

　　Robin Li said that thanks to Apollo's operation practice, Baidu's self-driving travel service platform "Radish Run" is normalizing commercial operations. In the third quarter, "Radish Run" provided 115,000 rides, making Baidu the world's largest provider of self-driving travel services. Baidu's future goals are to expand its business to 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030. In addition, Baidu has launched the first generation of electric trucks in Deepway, a joint venture with Shiqiao, a leading Chinese trucking company, to automate road freight, marking Apollo's entry into the multi-trillion-dollar trucking market; Jidu also plans to unveil its first concept car at the Beijing Auto Show next year, with the goal of achieving mass production by 2023.

　　Behind the rapid growth of Baidu's autonomous driving business is the long-term and firm maintenance of high-intensity research and development investment. In the third quarter of this year, Baidu's R&D expenditure reached 6.2 billion yuan, an increase of 35% year-on-year, and the intensity of R&D investment continued to rank at the forefront of the world's large technology companies. Benefiting from R&D investment, Baidu ushered in a number of fruitful results in the "two bases and one bottom" that is, basic research, basic technology and underlying innovation in the third quarter: the second generation of Kunlun AI chips announced mass production, which was 2-3 times higher than the performance of the first generation; released the world's first 10 billion parameter pre-training dialogue generation model PLATO-XL to achieve multi-round dialogue interaction between Chinese and English with "logic, content and fun"; Baidu ERNIE 3.0 refreshed 54 Chinese NLP task benchmarks. For the first time, a large-scale knowledge graph was introduced in a 10-billion-level pre-trained model.

　　China and the United States are in the global "bellwether" position in the field of autonomous driving. As the representative company of autonomous driving in the United States, according to public information, in August 2021, the Waymo fleet reached 615 vehicles, an increase of 68%, and it is expected that Waymo's quarterly order volume will be 202-4.03 million, and now the annual order volume is about 160,000. According to industry experts, Baidu Apollo is significantly ahead of Waymo in terms of key order volume indicators, which also means that Baidu has become the world's first in the field of large-scale operation of autonomous driving.

　　Experts pointed out that the future travel ecology with autonomous driving as the core is very likely to derive a trillion-level huge market, and China may become the world's largest autonomous driving market and a strong player on the track in the future. The technical route taken by self-driving companies in China and the United States is very different. After the "vehicle-road collaborative automatic driving mode" practiced by Chinese enterprises represented by Baidu is achieved, it will bring people an unprecedented travel experience under the intelligent car and intelligent road collaboration, and it will also help seize the initiative in the new round of international competition. (Zhongxin Jingwei APP)