On May 22, Robin Li, Co-founder, Chairman and CEO of Baidu, attended VivaTech, Europe’s biggest event dedicated to start-ups and tech in Paris, and had an exclusive fireside chat with Mr. Maurice Lévy, Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Publicis Groupe.
In an ideas-packed 30-minute discussion, Mr. Li shared his thoughts on recent developments in AI – its short and long-term future trajectory and how much work – and opportunity – remains ahead.
Talking of his desire to see the pace of AI improvement increase, Mr. Li said: “[the] fear is that the AI technology is not improving fast enough. Everyone is shocked at how fast the technology evolved over the past couple of years, but to me it’s still not fast enough. It’s too slow.”
Mr. Li argued that many are overstating how quickly we might arrive at Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). “A lot of people talk about AGI, they say: no, it’s probably two years away, it’s probably five years away. I think it’s more than 10 years away,” Mr. Li said.
Mr. Li emphasized his conviction that “an application-driven approach can also propel innovation in the foundation model and speed up the transformation from an internet age to an AI age.” He further added that in China, the focus is increasingly on creating super apps for the AI age, or killer AI native apps. ERNIE Bot, Baidu’s conversational AI bot released in March 2023, now has 200 million accumulated users.
Speaking of his expectations of the emergence of a new format to harness the power of AI and align with consumer demand, Mr. Li said he would expect some kind of brand new format to come out that becomes increasingly popular, that can reach a DAU (daily active user) of over 100 million.
Mr. Li continued: “Today, in the mobile age, you have apps like Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. But the daily active users are in the order of like a few hundred million to a billion users, right? And for AI native apps, we don’t see that yet […] What kind of AI native apps will be able to reach the 100 million user mark? […] What’s the right format? Is that just a chatbot or is that a co-pilot or it’s something else, we don’t know. […] What kind of product format is the right one that can fully take advantage of the power of generative AI, and can be used on a daily basis by everyone, by billions of people, right? We just don’t know that yet.”
Reflecting on his personal understanding of the power of AI, Mr. Li recalled his time as an undergraduate student: “I’m a believer in AI for a long time. Back 30-some years ago when I was in college, when I was an undergraduate student, I took courses in artificial intelligence in Beijing University. At that time, AI courses were not offered to undergraduate students. It was offered to graduate students. I had to go out of my way to take a graduate course in AI.”
Discussing the opportunity facing countries like France if they were to successfully harness the power of AI, Mr. Li said, “If AI can be as good as humans, it can solve the population problem. France has like probably 80 million people, right? And your GDP is everyone’s productivity times your total population. But when you have generative AI or AGI, you can have the productivity of eight billion people. That’s huge.”
Meanwhile, in comments at the Elysee Palace on May 21, when Mr. Li was a guest of French President Emmanuel Macron alongside tech entrepreneurs and investors, he stressed the duty of players like Baidu to ensure that AI develops in a socially responsible fashion.
Viva Technology is Europe’s biggest start-up and tech event. It accelerates innovation by connecting startups, tech leaders, major corporations and investors responding to our world’s biggest challenges. The 8th edition is taking place from May 22-25, 2024, in Paris, at Expo Porte de Versailles.
