Reported by Yang Qingqing, a 21st Century Economic Reporter, from Beijing
Faced with the ongoing hot "Hundred Model Wars" since the beginning of this year, the industry has also begun to experience "cold" thinking.
On November 15, at the Xilihu Forum, Robin Lee, chairman and CEO of Baidu Group, pointed out that there are many big models in China at present, but there are very few AI native applications developed based on the big models. The symbol of humanity entering the AI era is not the emergence of many large models, but the emergence of many AI native applications.
"The big model itself is a basic base, similar to the operating system, so ultimately developers need to rely on a small number of big models to develop a variety of native applications. Therefore, the constant repeated development of the basic big model is a great waste of social resources." Li Yanhong said bluntly, "In the AI native era, we need 1 million AI native applications, but we don't need 100 big models."
At the same time, around the industry's discussion on the general model and the special model, Robin Lee also judged that the value of the special model is very limited due to the lack of intelligence emerging ability. The industrialization mode of large models should combine the general capabilities of basic models with professional knowledge in the industry field. That is, large models are combined with small models, and specialized small models have fast response, low cost, and larger models are more intelligent, which can be used to cover the bottom line
Robin Lee said that since its opening on August 31, the number of API calls of Wenxin's big model has increased exponentially. Although there are currently over 200 large models in China, the actual number of calls is limited. "The number of calls from one Wenxin large model is even more than the total number of calls from these 200 large models
In the face of the future development of AI's original era, Robin Lee further pointed out three driving factors.
Firstly, a powerful basic model will drive the explosion of AI native applications. The best AI native applications have not yet emerged. Similar to the emergence of mobile native applications such as WeChat, Tiktok and Uber in the mobile era, excellent AI native applications will also be born in the AI native era, and they will be developed based on the basic big model.
Secondly, embracing the AI era requires the CEO and top executives to drive it. Only CEOs are concerned about whether new technologies have had a positive impact on key business indicators. This also means that if the CEO of a company does not actively lead the AI native transformation, it is easy to be biased.
Thirdly, a prosperous AI native application ecosystem will drive economic growth. Similar to the rapid development of the new energy vehicle industry, the AI industry will also be driven by demand. Therefore, efforts should be made on the demand side and application layer to encourage enterprises to use large models to develop native applications of artificial intelligence and use market means to promote industrial development.