"The big model has been popular for nearly two years, and related technologies have been iterated and innovated at an unprecedented speed. From large companies, entrepreneurs, and venture capital, people from all walks of life are looking for super applications based on the big model in the era of generative AI. However, objectively speaking, the super applications that people expect have not yet appeared, and some people even began to ask whether this global big model craze in the past 24 months is a new technological revolution or a new round of foam?" On November 12, at Baidu World 2024, Robin Lee, founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu Group, raised this question at the beginning of the keynote speech "Here Comes the Application".
Robin Lee believes that by the beginning of November, the daily average adjustment volume of Baidu Wenxin's big model had exceeded 1.5 billion, an increase of about 30 times compared with the 50 million times disclosed for the first time a year ago. "The growth rate exceeded expectations", indicating that AI is a real demand, which represents the outbreak of big model applications in China in the past two years. It further points out that retrieval enhancement has become an industry consensus, and the biggest change in the past two years for large models is the basic elimination of illusions and a significant improvement in the accuracy of answering questions.
As the big model illusion problem is solved, the application will usher in an explosion period. Robin Lee said that agents and industrial applications will become an important direction of AI applications. Among them, intelligent agents are the most mainstream form of AI applications and are about to reach an explosive point. Baidu currently promotes four types of AI intelligent agents: company official intelligent agents, role intelligent agents, tool intelligent agents, and industry intelligent agents.
"Today, all the world's top technology companies are paying attention to agents, but there are not many companies like Baidu that regard agents as the most important strategic direction." In Robin Lee's view, just like websites in the PC era, we media accounts in the mobile era, in the AI native era, agents will become new carriers of content, services and information. Public data shows that the Wenxin intelligent agent platform has attracted 150000 enterprises and 800000 developers to participate, covering numerous application scenarios.
In fact, Robin Lee has also stressed that "agents are exploding" on different occasions, thinking that agents are like websites in the Internet age. "How did websites come into being at that time? I can do it by looking at the source code through the browser and changing it a little. Today, doing an agent is very similar to this. Give it a name, tell it what to answer and what not to answer, and it will be done."
In terms of industrial applications, Robin Lee introduced how Baidu AI Cloud can create incremental value for enterprises in finance, energy, education, recruitment, public services and other fields through fine tuning large models, developing enterprise level applications and other ways. For example, Baidu has cooperated with Yum China, Zhilian Recruitment and other enterprises to help enterprises reduce costs and increase efficiency and improve user experience.
However, Robin Lee also said that to avoid falling into the "super application trap", it is the logic of thinking in the mobile era to have a 1 billion DAU level app. He released 100 industry applications based on big models, believing that this represents Baidu's attitude: not to launch a "super application", but to enable more people and enterprises to create millions of "super useful" applications.
For the application of AI in the future, Robin Lee said that with the exponential transition of big model technology and capabilities, natural language will become the most important programming language in this era. Everyone can create an AI application or intelligent agent that belongs to themselves or others.