Baidu CEO Robin Li: ERNIE Bot Users Exceed 200 Million, Releasing Three Major AI Development Tools

Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li delivered a keynote speech on the theme of ‘Everyone is a Developer’ at the Create 2024 Baidu AI Developers Conference today. He pointed out that ‘AI is sparking a creativity revolution, and in the future, developing applications will be as simple as shooting a short video. Everyone is a developer, everyone is a creator.’

Robin Li stated that Baidu, Inc., as a technology company, aims to provide necessary development tools for everyone as much as possible and enhance social creativity. This includes a powerful basic model series and three major AI development tools, which together form a toolbox that developers can take away and use on demand.

The ERNIE large model series includes: the flagship versions ERNIE 3.5 and 4.0, and the lightweight versions ERNIE Speed, Lite, Tiny, etc.; on site, Robin Li also officially released the tool version of ERNIE large model 4.0.

Robin Li revealed that since the release of ERNIE Bot more than a year ago, the number of users has exceeded 200 million. Currently, ERNIE’s large model has become China’s most advanced and widely used AI basic model.

Robin Li emphasized that smaller models derived from powerful dimensionality reduction in ERNIE 4.0 perform significantly better at the same size compared to directly using open-source models. With equivalent performance, costs are noticeably lower, so ‘open-source models will increasingly lag behind.’

SEE ALSO: Baidu CEO Robin Li: The Closed-Source Model Will Continue to Lead in Capabilities

At the same time, Baidu has also prepared three major AI development tools that are ‘ready to use,’ including the intelligent agent development tool AgentBuilder, the AI native application development tool AppBuilder, and various sizes of model customization tool ModelBuilder. ‘These three tools represent advanced productivity.’

During the meeting, Robin Li shared Baidu‘s specific ideas on developing AI native applications based on large models, pointing out that MoE, small models, and intelligent agents are three directions worth paying attention to. ‘This is what we at Baidu have achieved over the past year through countless trials and errors at a high cost.’