Returning to Paris, Robin Li is the spokesperson for Chinese AI

Photon Star Sphere

2024-05-23 16:54Posted on the official account of Beijing Photon Planet

China's AI industry is opening the door to the world.

On May 21, at the artificial intelligence theme salon in the French presidential palace, among a group of Western AI scientists and entrepreneurs, Turing Award winner Yang Likun was sitting next to Baidu's Robin Li. On the topic of how artificial intelligence can better serve humanity, top leaders from the United States, France and China exchanged their views.

Just one day later, Robin Li reappeared at the main forum of Viva Technology, the largest technology exhibition in Europe. French President Emmanuel Macron is a regular visitor to Viva, and executives from Elon Musk, Yang Likun, Meta and Google have also appeared frequently at previous conferences.

Of course, this is not the first time Robin Li has been invited to appear at the VivaTech conference.

Eight years ago, in 2016, Robin Li spoke with Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Groupe, about AI developments. Although Baidu held a 70% share of China's search engine market at the time, it had already decided to jump out of the search engine and go all-in on AI.

Eight years later, Robin Li took the stage again, and for him it was a return to the origin of devoting himself to AI, and domestic technology companies represented by Baidu have made great strides in the past period. The invitation to attend reflects that the voice of Chinese science and technology in the international market is continuing to increase.

李彦宏这次演讲主题也是a view from china，站在国际舞台上讲中国AI的故事。

"I think China is going in a more application-driven direction. Everything starts from the same starting point, and the advancement or improvement of technology is driven by the use case. For example, in the United States, and possibly in Europe, there is a focus on the most cutting-edge base models. But in China, despite the fact that there are hundreds of basic models, there is a growing discussion about what a super app is in the age of AI, or what is a killer app, or AI native. ”

"We decided to serve mainly the Chinese market, so we had to do it well, better than all the other models in the world in Chinese. Now Wenxin Large Model 4.0 is better than Chinese GPT 4 because we use more Chinese data to train the model. ”

When I met with the French president, I also talked about the development of AI in China. Last year's JP Morgan event, aimed at foreign audiences and investors, was also in English, introducing Chinese people who are good at building apps.

Every time Robin Li speaks English, he praises Chinese AI and the Chinese's endeavor. On the global stage, with China in mind.

Eight years of reincarnation

"It's great to be back in Paris after 8 years. It's been a long time since we've seen each other. ”

The first line of dialogue at the beginning of the main drama is often surprisingly simple. In the "fireside chat" at the main VivaTech venue, the first round of dialogue between the host and Robin Li was more like a reunion of old friends.

"The world has changed", Robin Li's emotion is obviously aimed at the current AI technology to reconstruct the mobile Internet ecology, and Baidu is no exception. "Over the past few years, we've made an important strategic shift from a predominantly internet-centric enterprise to an AI-first company, and now we're diving deeper into unlocking the huge potential of AI."

When summarizing his eight-year development history with Baidu, Robin Li mentioned that artificial intelligence has moved from specialization to generalization. A typical feature is that in the past, large amounts of data were required and could only be applied to a narrow range, but now a small amount of data can be used to accomplish a wider range of tasks in a variety of scenarios.

Artificial intelligence is pushing the boundaries of knowledge, and Robin Li believes that what Baidu is doing is to make it universally accessible by lowering the barriers to access as much as possible. This includes both the superficial price and the AI reconstruction in the application scenario.

From the Sino-French joint statement to the speech at the main venue of VivaTech, in just over half a month, the cooperation between China and the international AI is significantly strengthened. The statement said that the two sides fully recognize the profound impact and key role of the rapid development of AI technology, and will strengthen cooperation and promote international governance.

Robin Li's speech at the main forum made the outside world further perceive the unique advantages of China's AI. It can be briefly summarized into two, rich application scenarios and young talents.

According to the Annual Report on Core Trends of China's Internet (2023) previously released by Questmobile, as of the end of 2023, the number of monthly active users of the domestic mobile Internet has exceeded 1.224 billion, and the average monthly time of users to access the Internet has stabilized within 160 hours. Such a large user group makes the mobile consumption and payment volume huge, and has a huge number of application scenarios in multiple dimensions such as consumption, travel, medical care, tourism, and logistics.

Robin Li also said at the VivaTech conference that the biggest advantage of China's development of artificial intelligence lies in its rich and diverse application scenarios. After all, AI can only reach its maximum potential if it is applied to a specific application.

The Chinese market has given birth to the world's largest and most abundant application scenarios, such as artificial intelligence, which greatly improves the service efficiency of healthcare, energy, shopping, people's livelihood and other fields, and at the same time, there is a high demand for intelligence in the complete domestic industrial chain.

In May last year, Robin Li said: "I am very optimistic about the development prospects of AI applications in China, and if we look back at the history of the past few decades, everyone in China is very willing to embrace emerging technologies." Although we didn't invent Android, iOS, or Windows, we did develop many very innovative apps like WeChat, Douyin, and Didi, and many of them were popular and useful. In the age of artificial intelligence, the same is true. Technology opens up a lot of possibilities, and we're very good at developing apps and making the most of them. ”

It is also understandable why Robin Li pointed out at the recent conference that Baidu's current focus is on making the basic model "efficient and affordable" for more people.

Another advantage is talent. In addition to the basic market of higher education gross enrollment ratio, which is close to 60%, many domestic AI companies have solved their own talent problems, cultivated talents, and provided scenario and financial support for entrepreneurs.

At the Create 2024 Baidu AI Developer Conference a month ago, Robin Li mentioned that Baidu has completed the cultivation of 5 million AI talents ahead of schedule. These talents will accelerate the implementation of AI in fields such as healthcare, education, finance, and industry.

In addition, the "Wenxin Cup" entrepreneurship competition, launched last year, attracted nearly 1,000 entrepreneurial teams to sign up, and Baidu provided nearly 100 million yuan of investment support for 15 of the winning teams. Each team brings a large number of AI-native applications in the fields of productivity tools, marketing, entertainment, social networking, and e-commerce; Among them, more than 30 innovative potential projects were shortlisted for the demo development link, which was connected to the Baidu Intelligent Cloud Qianfan large model platform and carried out demo development based on the Wenxin large model.

One participant told Photon Planet that the event not only reduced the cost of entrepreneurs to develop around the big model, but more importantly, let all development teams actually perceive it as a big model of productivity.

These two advantages are the core factors for Chinese AI companies to have a global voice and participate in global cooperation.

Drink on the banks of the Masséna

Undoubtedly, the outside world is full of curiosity about the development of AI in China, and Maurice Lévy, co-president of VivaTech, asked Robin Li about the current situation and future development direction of China and Baidu at the meeting.

Eight years ago, China and Baidu were in their infancy in artificial intelligence, and eight years later, China's AI represented by Baidu has obviously become a force to be reckoned with in global AI.

With rapid iteration and continuous landing, the domestic large model has established differentiated advantages.

For example, the Wenxin model. Since 2019, Baidu released version 1.0 of the Wenxin model, and by the end of last year, it has been iterated to 4.0, and has achieved further significant improvements in general capabilities such as code generation, code interpretation, and code optimization, reaching the international leading level. Previously, Baidu had mentioned that the average daily call volume of Wenxin large model API exceeded 200 million, an increase of 300% year-on-year compared with the previous quarter.

At the VivaTech conference, Robin Li also mentioned Baidu's full-stack layout in artificial intelligence, from computing power to frameworks, models, and applications, which are seamlessly optimized end-to-end and quickly improve the efficiency of the underlying model. ERNIE's training throughput is 5.1 times higher than last year. Its queries per second (i.e., QPS for inference) also increased significantly by 105X, while the inference cost dropped to only 1% of the March 2023 release.

Earlier, the SuperBench Large Model Comprehensive Capability Evaluation Framework developed by the Basic Model Research Center of Tsinghua University and Zhongguancun Laboratory officially released the March 2024 edition of the "SuperBench Large Model Comprehensive Capability Evaluation Report".

The evaluation included a total of 14 representative models at home and abroad, and the results showed that the performance of Wenxin Yiyan 4.0 was close to the level of the world's first-class models, and the gap has gradually narrowed.

The Chinese model is clearly more advantageous in Chinese.

At present, in the global evaluation list of various large models, domestic large models have long occupied half of the seats in the TOP10, among which Baidu Wenxin large model, Ali Tongyi Qianwen, Zhipu GLM-4, etc. are firmly ranked in the TOP5, maintaining the world-class level in the overall ability of understanding, logic, memory, etc., and the longboard in Chinese understanding and creation is prominent.

Robin Li said in March that Wenxin Model 4.0 had surpassed GPT-4 in Chinese.

As mentioned above, the advantages of domestic data and scenarios have created unique advantages for the domestic AI industry, which can also be seen from the implementation of Baidu's large model in the fields of to C and B.

As of the first quarter of this year, mobile phone manufacturers, including Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo, have all accessed the Wenxin large model API.

The Wenxin model is connected to the HONOR MagicOS 100 model ecological plan to output more professional user services for the HONOR YOYO assistant, such as localized text creation, knowledge quizzes, life suggestions, etc. The combination of the "Wenxin Model" on the cloud and the "Magic Model" of Honor's platform-level device-side AI model can provide users with new functions that analyze health information, automatically generate concrete prompts, and then dispatch the Wenxin model to generate more comprehensive personalized fitness plans.

Samsung's latest S24 flagship phone has also integrated a number of capabilities of the Wenxin model, including calls, translations, smart summarization and other functions. It is worth mentioning the "Circle and Search" function, which allows users to obtain accurate search results for text, images, and videos with the help of simple gestures.

The field of cooperation for large models is also expanding from mobile phones to PCs and electric vehicles, and Lenovo and NIO also reached a cooperation during the quarter. It is reported that based on the Wenxin large model, NIO cockpit AI partner has been launched, and the first batch of all models of NIO NT 2.0/2.2 platform has been launched, and nearly 200,000 vehicles have been pushed so far.

The intelligent transformation in the To B field is also worthy of attention. Earlier, based on the Wenxin large model and relying on the capabilities of Baidu Intelligent Cloud Qianfan large model platform, Baidu Intelligent Cloud and Shanyuan Technology jointly created the intelligent application "Dr. Electric and Digital Dispatcher" in the mining industry, such as providing accompanying professional assistance for management personnel, on-site operators, and command and dispatch personnel.

In addition to the above landing scenarios, three AI development tools were released at the Create 2024 Baidu AI Developer Conference, including the agent development tool AgentBuilder, the AI native application development tool AppBuilder, and the model customization tool ModerBuilder. 3 will solve the lack of "shovel" in domestic AI native application development.

Global AI Race

Throughout May, many landmark events took place in large models at home and abroad.

OpenAI has released its flagship model, GPT-4o, which can perform real-time inference on audio, visual, and text, responding to audio input in less than 232 milliseconds, similar to the response time of humans in conversations. A day later, Google released Gemini 1.5 Pro, and we saw Gemini's extensive distribution strategy, Project Astra application exploration, and Veo's idea generation and underlying technology iterations.

Immediately afterwards, Microsoft launched the "Copilot+PC" series, which is more focused on enterprise productivity.

In China, on the one hand, in order to accelerate the landing of large models on the industrial side and seize as much market share as possible; On the other hand, the giants tried to use price means to separate users from customers, and after Byte and Ali successively reduced the price of tokens of their respective main models, Baidu immediately launched a free plan.

From a macro point of view, although there are differences in the rhythm of domestic and foreign markets, it is undeniable that large models and AI products must penetrate into the lives of users and the production of enterprises at the same time. As Robin Li said earlier, it is meaningless to roll the mold large, and the application opportunity of the roll is greater, after all, the large model can only really change the existing business ecology if it is really "used".

At present, the "price war" has objectively lowered the threshold for the use of domestic large models to the minimum, and the Sino-French cooperation and the VivaTech conference have opened a window to the world for domestic AI. Next, we may see that in the global AI market, China's AI voice will continue to increase.

As Robin Li said at VivaTech, there are many areas where actors around the globe can collaborate to apply AI technologies to the public good, such as bridging the digital divide, promoting sustainable development, tackling global climate change and protecting biodiversity, as well as enhancing global agricultural production, education, and overall public health.

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