"In the future, natural language will become the new general-purpose programming language, and as long as you can speak, you can become a developer and change the world with your creativity. ”
On April 16, Robin Li, founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, delivered a keynote speech on "Everyone is a Developer" at the Create 2024 Baidu AI Developer Conference.
"In the past year, I have talked to many entrepreneurs and developers, and I feel that everyone is in a state of 'FOMO', both excited and afraid of missing out. Robin Li said.
Over the past year, AI is reshaping society's perceptions.
However, the advent of the era of large models and the explosion of AI native applications have brought opportunities to entrepreneurs and developers, but also made many ordinary people confused. In the face of the huge tuyere of the AI era, how do ordinary people apply them, how do they make agents, and how do they ensure that they can keep up with the pace of the AI era?
Robin Li gave the exact answer: "Everyone can be a developer." ”
He believes that large models and generative AI will revolutionize the developer community, "AI is setting off a creative revolution, and in the future, developing applications is as simple as shooting a short video, everyone is a developer, everyone is a creator." ”
At the meeting, Robin Li said that Baidu, as a technology company, Baidu will try its best to provide everyone with the development tools they need to enhance social creativity, including a powerful basic model series, that is, Wenxin large model, and three AI development tools, including agent development tool AgentBuilde, AI native application development tool AppBuilder and model customization tool ModelBuilder of various sizes. They form a toolbox that developers can pack and take away.
The number of Wenxin Yiyan users exceeded 200 million, and the average daily API call volume exceeded 200 million
It is understood that Baidu officially released the intelligent code assistant Baidu Comate 2.0 on April 3, which is free for individual developers. Previously, Comate has been working in Baidu for 1 year, Robin Li revealed at the conference, "After more than a year on the job, Comate has entered tens of thousands of companies such as Himalaya, Mitsubishi Elevator, iSoftStone, etc., and the code adoption rate generated has reached 46%, and 27% of Baidu's new code every day has been generated by Comate." ”
Robin Li believes that with the help of AI, everyone can become a developer, "Today, you can make an AI application without writing code, and you can make an agent without programming." AI is setting off a revolution in creativity, and developing applications in the future is as simple as shooting a short video, everyone is a developer, and everyone is a creator. ”
At the conference, Robin Li also disclosed the latest user data of Wenxin Yiyan, "Wenxin Yiyan was released on March 16 last year, and it is one year and one month to today. The number of our users has exceeded 200 million, the average daily API call volume has also exceeded 200 million, the number of customers served has reached 85,000, and the number of AI native applications developed using the Qianfan platform has exceeded 190,000. ”
Robin Li revealed that compared with a year ago, the algorithm training efficiency of Wenxin's large model has increased to 5.1 times, the average weekly training efficiency has reached 98.8%, the inference performance has been improved by 105 times, and the cost of inference has been reduced to 1%. In other words, customers can now make 1 million calls a day at the same cost instead of 10,000,000 calls a day.
Thanks to the power of the Wenxin large model, the smaller size model that developers cut out through Wenxin 4.0 dimensionality reduction is significantly better than the model directly called up from the open source model, and the cost is significantly lower under the same effect. Robin Li emphasized, "Everyone used to use open source and thought that open source was cheap, but in fact, in the large model scenario, open source is the most expensive. So the open source model will fall further and further behind. ”
In addition to the development tools, Robin Li also brings financial and resource support to developers. At the conference, Robin Li announced that the second "Wenxin Cup" Entrepreneurship Competition was officially launched, recruiting entrepreneurial and innovative teams in the direction of AI native applications for the global market and college students, and setting up a "special award". He said, "Particularly outstanding projects will have the opportunity to receive 50 million yuan in cash and resource support. ”
Agents bring an explosion of applications
In terms of specific ideas for developing AI native applications, Robin Li mentioned that MoE, small models and agents are three directions worth paying attention to, "This is what our Baidu has stepped on countless pits and paid high tuition fees in exchange for the practice of the past year." ”
The agent is further trained on the basic model for thinking enhancement, including supervised fine-tuning of the thinking process, preference learning for behavioral decision-making, and reinforcement learning for outcome reflection, so as to obtain the thinking model. Like a human, the agent's thinking model reads instructions, learns how to use tools, and can invoke tools to complete tasks.
Wang Haifeng, chief technology officer of Baidu, believes that intelligent twins are an important development direction that will bring more application explosions. From trillions of training data, the Wenxin model has learned both natural language and code capabilities, opening up the process from thinking to execution. Based on these two capabilities of the Wenxin model, Baidu has developed code agents and intelligent code assistants. Wang Haifeng said: "Code agents allow everyone to do things that only programmers can do before, and everyone can become programmers, while intelligent code assistants help professional programmers write better code more efficiently, which can be said to be programmers' AI peers." ”
He Junjie, Senior Vice President of Baidu Group and General Manager of Baidu's Mobile Ecosystem Business Group, said that intelligent twins will reshape the way people interact with technology, bringing new application ecosystems, traffic patterns and business models. He Junjie revealed that at the user level, Baidu mobile ecology is committed to creating "super intelligent twins available to everyone", and he showed the new progress of Baidu's new library and Wenxin Yiyan APP; at the customer level, merchant intelligent twins, smart broadcast stars, etc. are becoming the standard configuration and infrastructure of business operations; at the ecological level, AgentBuilder (Wenxin intelligent twins platform) is committed to making everyone an intelligent twink developer, and becoming a platform that everyone can develop, operate, and benefit from.
In addition, Baidu ecological platforms such as Baidu search, maps, and Tieba can also access the capabilities of intelligent twins, so that developers can get real traffic support.
Robin Li believes that "agents may be the closest and most mainstream way to use large models for everyone in the future, and based on a powerful basic model, agents can be generated in batches and applied in a variety of scenarios." ”
"In the first week of launch, it was successfully distributed 1.55 million times and interacted with users 58,000 times, with a linear increase in lead conversion, a significant reduction in the conversion cost of effective leads, and a significant improvement in operational efficiency. ”
The biggest application scenario of the large visual model is autonomous driving
Facing the future, Robin Li believes that the multi-modal large model, or the integration of text, pictures, voice, video and other multi-modalities, is a very important long-term development direction of the basic model, and is the only way to AGI, "Baidu has long-term investment in these fields, and will update the latest progress of the large model in a timely manner." ”
Robin Li also said, "I have a very different judgment: the biggest application scenario of the visual model is autonomous driving. Baidu is the best in this direction, a global leader in autonomous driving, and we train AI not only on how to generate video, but also on AI to understand what's happening in the real world and predict the future. ”
Robin Li revealed that based on more than 100 million kilometers of road test mileage data in complex cities in China, Baidu has trained the Apollo visual perception model. It has four basic capabilities: detection, tracking, understanding, and mapping. This gives Baidu a smarter, more adaptable, and safer autonomous driving solution.
At the conference, Shen Dou, Executive Vice President of Baidu Group and President of Baidu Intelligent Cloud Business Group, officially released a new generation of intelligent computing operating system - Wanyuan, which shields users from the complexity of cloud native systems and heterogeneous computing power and improves the efficiency and experience of AI native application development through the abstraction and packaging design of the intelligent computing platform in the AI native era.
Shen said that with the continuous evolution of large model technology, programming through natural language is becoming a reality. Programming will no longer be process- or object-oriented, but requirements-oriented, and the process of programming will become a process for developers to express their wishes and bring revolutionary changes to the operating system. In the kernel of the operating system, the underlying hardware has changed from CPU computing power to GPU computing power, and the world knowledge compressed by large models has been added. The objects managed by the operating system have undergone a fundamental change, from managing processes and microservices to managing intelligence.
"Traditional cloud computing systems are still important, but they are no longer the protagonists, we need a new operating system, abstract and encapsulate the new computing platform, that is, intelligent computing, redefine human-computer interaction, and provide developers with a simpler and smoother development experience. Shen Xiao said.
"AI is setting off a creative revolution, and developing applications in the future is as simple as shooting a short video, everyone is a developer, and everyone is a creator. At the end of his speech, Robin Li said, "Today's China, with 1 billion Internet users, a strong basic model, enough AI application scenarios, and the world's most complete industrial system, is also vigorously encouraging and supporting the 'artificial intelligence +' action, and every person and every enterprise only needs to make full use of these tools to unleash unlimited creativity and productivity." ”
Written by: Nandu reporter Wang Chenchen