Li Yanhong, a little anxious

Author: Ren Shangkun

Source: Business People (ID: biz-leaders)

In the early morning of March 15, 2023, across the ocean, OpenAI held a GPT4 conference. But unlike before, this time, there are not many technical details. President Greg Brockman demonstrated the practical capabilities of GPT-4, from creating web pages to reading pictures to dealing with tax issues.

In a word, this guy is going to start making money.

On social media, the discussion about ChatGPT, an AI chat app based on GPT3, has not completely subsided. The official response improved the "accuracy" issue. It takes a cloud approach. This means that the more people use it, the lower the cost. Among its declared application scenarios, its new image recognition function is aimed at the visually impaired group.

A coincidence. At 16 o'clock on March 16, Baidu's "Wen Xin Yiyan" was scheduled to press conference. The whole network is waiting for it, but the invitation code is still needed. Li Yanhong said that the "Wen Xin Yiyan" in the internal test is not perfect, but the market has demand and must be launched, and the language ability of Wen Xin Yiyan Chinese is better than any large chatbot. He said earlier that Baidu's related technology has been laid out for a long time, not to catch up with the heat.

Li Yanhong spoke at the "Wen Xin One Word" press conference. Source: Visual China

GPT4 comes first. The changes in the AI world are increasingly caught off guard.

expect

This is arguably Baidu's most anticipated press conference in recent years. According to official sources, there are few media seats at this press conference, the list is reviewed by the top management, and the security is extremely strict.

In addition to Wen Xin's words, there was also a person named Wang Haifeng who attended the press conference with Li Yanhong. In the past senior management team, Wang Haifeng's public familiarity is not very high.

Wang Haifeng spoke at the press conference of "Wen Xin One Word". Source: Visual China

Haifeng Wang, the current CTO of Baidu, is a technical expert similar to Robin Li, whose early work experience focused on the basic theoretical research of natural language processing (NLP) and speech, as well as the development of machine translation systems. He joined Baidu in 2010 and has led areas such as deep learning. Eight years later, at the end of 2018, Baidu made a new round of organizational restructuring, and Wang Haifeng was appointed CTO.

It is not easy to get Li Yanhong's favor in Baidu. Li Yanhong once said that there are no more than three people in the world who can do Baidu CTO. Before Wang Haifeng took office, it had been nine years since Li Yinan, Baidu's last CTO, stepped down. Before that, Liu Jianguo, one of the founding members of the "Baidu Seven Musketeers", served as a CTO, but his term was only about a year.

For the first time in 10 years, Robin Li handed over the scepter of the group's CTO. At present, Wang Haifeng is on the cusp of the storm.

As we all know, AI and technology are the background color of Baidu, and it is also the symbol of Li Yanhong's perennial walking. In 2017, Wang Haifeng integrated internal AI resources and established Baidu's AI technology platform system. By 2020, the architecture will be further upgraded to Baidu's AI Group (AIG) that includes two major groups (technology middle office and intelligent cloud). This was once regarded as basically establishing an AI business system centered on Wang Haifeng in addition to Li Yanhong.

Wen Xin's words are an opportunity for Wang Haifeng, of course, it is a challenge. In May last year, Li Yanhong sent an all-staff email to start a new round of cadre rotation, and Wang Haifeng's Intelligent Cloud Business Group (ACG) was taken over by Shen Zhen, who was still in charge of the Technology Middle Office Group (TPG), while Wang continued to serve as the group's executive vice president and CTO. There are various internal accounts about this personnel change.

Not long ago, when ChatGPT was popular, the "Channel" column of financial writer Wu Xiaobo published an article, and a Baidu employee said on the above adjustment, "Since then, I feel that Mr. Wang's sense of presence within has declined a lot." In the face of the sudden ChatGPT and Wen Xin's words, insiders also expressed their mentality at that time, "This time is really a pie falling from the sky, just like a private order, I hope to catch it." After all, Mr. Wang has engaged in a lot of forms of search in the past, to be honest, he does not seek innovation, nor does he want things to be amazing, but only wants to copy ChatGPT to achieve nine achievements."

Baidu's stock price rose sharply one after another. Since the end of 2022, ChatGPT has gradually become popular, and Baidu's stock price has risen by more than 125%.

However, some employees of Baidu's NLP department expressed concern, lest Wen Xin's words follow in the footsteps of "Xi Long". "Xi Long" is a metaverse product released by Baidu at the end of 2021. However, at that time, the internal efforts were being made to reduce costs and increase efficiency, and the Greek project originally led by the game department was taken over by the security department, and the market response and internal evaluation after the launch were not high.

This has made many Baidu people hang their hearts about the release of new products.

In the previous interview with Wu Xiaobo's channel, some employees felt that even if the "Wen Xin Yiyan" online effect is not satisfactory, it doesn't matter, after all, OpenAI is specialized in doing this thing, Baidu assault half a year can not be achieved overnight, as long as it can be close to its ability, it is enough to fight all over the country without opponents. Again, this is a big expectation.

Wen Xin's words came out. Baidu and Robin Li will face torture, just as they torture products of the present and the past.

Plate of the product

Over the years, Baidu has made a lot of products, even if it is not a family barrel, it can be lined up, among which the most heavyweight should be Baidu's starting edge search engine. This gives Baidu the position of the entrance to information. Huge traffic becomes a first-mover advantage.

In the era of PGC (Agency Produced Content) of Web 1.0, all kinds of news on the Internet, as well as professional information, are controlled by the portal. It was a stage of lack of information channels, and demand was much greater than supply.

It was a long time before the concept of "user experience" became widespread. At the beginning of 2021, in a conversation with Lin Jun, the author of "Fifteen Years of Boiling", Yu Jun, former vice president of Baidu products, said that the entire Internet industry was small at that time, and everyone could not tell the difference between product managers. He alone did all the work related to search engine products except research and development.

From the first day of Baidu's search box launch, Yu Jun has been in Baidu for eight years. Before he left Baidu in 2009, he said he had never heard the term "technology-driven", "At that time, there was an emphasis on 'engineer culture', but it was not the same thing as 'technology-driven', the former emphasized frank, equal and simple, and internal communication that talked about data reasoning."

Tieba in the form of a community can be regarded as a star-level product on the eve of Baidu's entry into the mobile Internet. Yu Jun single-handedly created the sticker bar. After that, after the baptism of the SARS epidemic, the domestic e-commerce station came to the bridge. Li Mingyuan, introduced by Yu Jun in the Tieba era, was entrusted by Li Yanhong with important responsibilities, and he became the general manager of Baidu's e-commerce business unit in 2007, responsible for its Baidu Youah and Baipay businesses.

Li Mingyuan has successively rotated in Baidu Mobile Product Department and Mobile-Cloud Business Department. By 2013, Li was promoted to vice president of Baidu, and by April 2014, he became a member of E-Staff, officially entering the highest decision-making level. For Li Mingyuan, who was just 31 years old at the time, he probably did not expect to leave two years later due to corruption. It was an eventful time in Baidu. In the years since Mr. Li returned to China's richest man in 2012, he has yet to produce a weapon large enough to grab a new ticket. Li Yanhong attacked from all sides.

There is a news in 2022 that has not attracted much attention from the outside world. Baidu Nuomi, a C product that was personally stood by Li Yanhong, was officially announced that it will officially stop service at the end of the year. Baidu's net profit in 2015 fell by 1/4 year-on-year, which Robin Li admitted was related to the fact that he invested 20 billion yuan into O2O. Li's main business line at that time, in addition to O2O, also had LBS, that is, Baidu Map.

Baidu, which intends to enter the takeaway market, lacks the genes of the ground forces and has less pyrotechnics.

The rise of Douyin will not be until 2017. Baidu's current number two Shen Shao became the person who was selected to compete with the headlines, Li Yanhong's mouth, who "can win the battle". Baidu made a hand-made app that year, and before that, the easy platform, box computing, and light applications were all explored. At the beginning, Baidu reinvested in O2O, and sold all the videos, music, literature, etc. Shen Jing took over the comprehensive transformation of information flow, and Baidu's content side began to have Baijia number, good-looking videos, mini programs, etc. Traffic and revenue figures have improved somewhat.

Baidu still has to be the entrance and create a plate of information. Just like making mini programs and constantly inviting major institutions to play together, on the eve of the release of this Wen Xin's words, the news of many enterprise access has appeared on the Internet. As a rare appearance in the high spotlight after carrying the banner of AI, some voices from the outside world said that Wen Xin's words are a battle that Baidu cannot lose.

In 2019, Fang Kecheng, the director of the "News Lab", complained that Baidu was dead, a search engine, accusing Baijianumber of spreading fake news and occupying a high position on the search homepage. Baidu responded afterwards that the content of Baijia accounted for less than 10% of the total site.

In the era of information explosion, supply has far exceeded demand. Baidu is different from WeChat. Baidu, characterized by centralization and strong entrance, may also have heavier responsibilities for the distribution of traffic and information.

Together with the information experience, this together constitutes the user's expectations.

"Feel the feedback roll innovation"

In 2016, the Wei Zexi incident. That should be the most critical moment in Baidu's history, not even one of them.

Baidu's new war began officially after that, accompanied by high-frequency organizational changes. At the beginning of 2017, Lu Qi, who was once regarded as the "light of Chinese in Silicon Valley", became the president and COO of Baidu Group. The first thing Lu Qi did when he arrived was to sort out the business lines and set two major directions: the main line (consolidating the mobile foundation) and the secondary line (decisive battle in the AI era). Shen Zhen also reported directly to Lu Qi since then.

However, Lu Qi left office after less than 500 days in office. Including Wu Enda, Zhang Yaqin, Xiang Hailong and more than a dozen other executives have left one after another, Baidu has attracted a lot of attention. Communication and communication are two-level things. Lu Qi's arrival is more like introducing a new communication atmosphere to Baidu, and trying to become a mechanism. On Zhihu, a Baidu infrastructure engineer once said that he posted a post on the intranet to discuss search business problems, and then asked questions at the fresh air conference. He didn't expect that Lu Qi pulled the person in charge of search and information flow and discussed it with him in person, and Lu Qi marked the core idea for each paragraph of the post and added his own ideas.

Baidu's current core revenue source is still content-side advertising, and the second and third curves are AI businesses such as intelligent cloud and autonomous driving.

In the past six months, Li Yanhong has mentioned "innovation" at high density.

At the company's internal director meeting in October 2022, he fully described Baidu's innovative concept -

Markets may be based on social change and public popularity. The market has a certain lag.

In the face of the media, Li Yanhong once confessed his shortcomings, saying that he prefers to sit in front of the computer, pay attention to products, pay attention to technology, and do not like to deal with people too much. He is undoubtedly a top technologist and the best at solving technical problems. That's where his fun and energy come in. It's just that when the Internet gradually evolved into infrastructure and the boundaries expanded to social problems that were both concrete and abstract, Li Yanhong was somewhat out of focus. This is a problem that he wants to solve, and it is also a problem that he cannot bypass in leading Baidu to the new AI era.

Things return, people return to people, each has a branch. Guiyang, 2017. Robin Li once again said that the key to innovation and technology lies in data. In 2018, a person surnamed Ma expressed a little view on artificial intelligence, saying that AI is a technology, but it is not a specific technology, it is a way of thinking to understand the external world, understand the future world, and understand human beings themselves.

Speaking of what it is, sometimes it is quite important, and the negation of negation is the hardest.

*Title image purchased from Visual China