"
When the concept of the meta-universe broke out a few years ago, it was also the same as today's big model, and related concept stocks continued to rise and fall, and major giant companies launched related products. But now, after low tide, there are naked swimmers everywhere.
Author 丨 Pastoral Song
Editor丨Nuts
Cover source丨Unsplash
"
With the departure of Ma Jie, former vice president of Baidu and head of "Xi Long" products, Baidu's metaverse strategy, which was once pinned on high hopes, is in jeopardy.
Back at the end of 2021, Baidu officially released the first domestic "domestic metaverse" product, which was named "Xi Long". And the overwhelming publicity and preemptive release of gimmicks at the beginning are the same as today's "Wen Xin Yiyan".
But in less than two years, "Xi Long" has been unable to pick up its former glory. According to the interface news report, although the Baidu Xiyang team has not yet been disbanded, the future is not clear, and some personnel have been transferred or left.
As the founder of Xiyang, Ma Jie's departure is even more regrettable, he has worked at Baidu for 8 years, led Baidu Search, Baidu Know, Baidu Wenku and other star products, and was promoted to vice president of Baidu in 2021.
In the farewell long article released by Ma Jie's circle of friends, he claimed that leaving Baidu was a "personal decision", and also said, "The metaverse will take at least five years, and it will definitely grow into a towering tree, I hope everyone will give patience and care." ”
1
Baidu Xi loam food is tasteless
As a metaverse project born during the pandemic, Xi Yang was originally inspired by the dilemma of not being able to meet face-to-face during the epidemic, and positioned itself as an immersive virtual space parallel to the physical world.
Ma Jie, who has worked at Baidu for many years, was assigned to be directly responsible for Xiyang products, and the project was launched in 2020 and officially launched in 2021. Ma Jie also has full confidence in the metaverse and Xiyang products, he once said, "We believe that the metaverse is one of the directions of the future Internet, and we hope that through the platform of Xiyang, users can find their own sense of belonging and existence in the virtual world, and also discover more possibilities and fun." ”
In order to create momentum for his own metaverse products, Baidu founder Robin Li has stood for it many times, and the 2021 Baidu AI Developer Conference chose to be held in the Greek metaverse, and Robin Li personally appeared and issued a speech in the metaverse.
However, as time passed, Baidu's metaverse products began to gradually expose the problem of difficulty in monetization. Except for the "meeting" scenario, which is not just needed, other aspects of commercial application are lackluster.
According to public information, throughout 2022, more than 120 metaverse activities and spaces were completed in Xiyang, but according to Ma Jie, the head of Xiyang, these commercial projects have only brought "hundreds of millions of yuan of commercial income".
Compared with Baidu's overall total revenue of 123.7 billion yuan in 2022, the revenue of the metaverse can be described as a drop in the bucket.
In addition to the lack of monetization at this stage, the growth space of the metaverse is also full of uncertainty, and many technology Internet giants at home and abroad have not made major breakthroughs in this field, but news of layoffs and shutdowns of related businesses has come out from time to time.
Of course, for Baidu, reducing investment in metaverse projects also comes from the balance between business lines, the rise of ChatGPT this year has led to the fire of the big model track, Baidu also has many years of layout in this field, "Wen Xin Yiyan" after the release of it has attracted widespread attention in China. Finally, when the wind comes, Baidu is bound to put more resources and energy into the large-model battlefield with more imaginative space.
2
Want to emulate Luckin?
Objectively speaking, not only Baidu, but also the giants who made heavy bets in the metaverse field two or three years ago are now almost unable to see the expected returns, and shrinking business lines has almost become a common phenomenon in the industry.
NetEase, which once had great enthusiasm for the meta-universe, almost changed the title of founder Ding Lei to "Yuan Shi Tianzun", and like Baidu, NetEase also launched the meta-universe virtual activity platform "Yaotai", but after running for more than a year, this product has become more and more chicken like Xi Long.
After the epidemic faded, offline exhibitions and activities ushered in a long-lost recovery, and although online conference products such as Yaotai and Xiyang have the concept gimmick of the meta-universe, they cannot completely replace offline scenes after all. In addition, its own functional creativity has never made a revolutionary breakthrough, so that such products can only be trapped in vertical business scenarios such as conferences, events and exhibitions.
Internet giants like ByteDance, which are trying to cut the metaverse cake from the hardware field, are also difficult to explore a clear business path at this stage.
In 2021, Byte spent a lot of money to acquire virtual reality startup PICO, which was also known as the largest acquisition of the domestic VR track at that time, but after Byte took over, several VR products subsequently launched by PICO failed to set off a large upsurge in the market, even if Byte used traffic resources including Douyin, it was difficult to make PICO's products have a circle effect.
In February this year, PICO announced that a new round of personnel optimization would be carried out.
In addition to the above-mentioned companies, domestic Tencent and Kuaishou, overseas Meta, Microsoft and other companies have adjusted their investment in the metaverse business this year, and there are many metaverse business leaders with large manufacturers who have transferred or left.
When the concept of the meta-universe broke out a few years ago, it was also the same as today's big model, and related concept stocks continued to rise and fall, and major giant companies have launched related products. But now, after low tide, there are naked swimmers everywhere.
3
Will Wen Xin's words follow in his footsteps?
Baidu, which has always prided itself on being a technology-based company, puts aside the degree of recognition at the public level, but one thing that has to be admitted is that the speed of product landing does have certain advantages. From the earliest release of the first domestic metaverse product to the first release of the first domestic large-language model Wen Xin this year, Baidu always seems to have a first-mover advantage in the face of new technology concepts.
But whether this advantage translates into long-term success is not something that can be achieved simply by inventing a few new concepts. From the experience of Xiyang, whether it is Baidu or other domestic companies, if they want to achieve long-term development in the field of large models, they must first solve the problem of commercialization.
At the beginning of the rise of the meta-universe, the outside world generally predicted that large-scale applications would be produced in the field of games and pan-entertainment, but from the perspective of the industry situation in the past two years, due to the lack of sticky interaction and gameplay of entrance devices such as VR, user stickiness is not high, and it is naturally difficult to produce greater commercial benefits.
In today's large model field, although it has shown the characteristics of replacing manual labor, as far as domestic large model products are concerned, the business model in general dialogue AI is lackluster, but there is greater room for imagination in industrial GPT.
Once it involves the industrial application of the B-side, it will encounter some old problems, such as how to establish long-term cooperation with downstream scene enterprises, how to balance common templates and customization, and whether the core technology is open source.
For enterprises, this long-term business model exploration needs to be a bargaining chip for time, and in recent years, except for such a huge track as cloud computing and autonomous driving, few other companies are willing to stick to long-term investment. More is such a "virtual fire" as the meta-universe, it is difficult to see returns in the short term, once encountering other emerging industry concepts, enterprises will immediately adjust their focus and pour more resources into new business.
Frankly speaking, this is not a problem of Baidu, many domestic companies, even in the name of the artificial intelligence national team, are more playing the role of "wind chaser", rather than a player who really has the ability to create a wind outlet.
Whether it is the metaverse that has gradually drifted away, or the emerging big model, Baidu needs to further prove itself, after all, a company that claims to be ALL in in the era of artificial intelligence cannot always rely on advertising revenue to decorate the façade.
Long-term call for manuscripts, once published, the remuneration is very large
The spiral laboratory has been occupied