The competition in the field of large models has become increasingly fierce due to the competition over roll parameters, roll prices, and open/closed sources, known as the "Hundred Model Battle". On May 16th, Baidu released its first quarter 2024 report, stating that its non online marketing revenue was 6.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6%. Baidu stated that this was mainly driven by its intelligent cloud business, with revenue from its intelligent cloud business reaching 4.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 12%, far exceeding Baidu's total revenue growth. Revenue from generative artificial intelligence and basic models is included in its intelligent cloud business.
AI drives Baidu AI Cloud business growth
On May 16th, Baidu Group disclosed its first quarter report for 2024, which showed that the group achieved a revenue of 31.5 billion yuan in the first quarter of this year, a year-on-year increase of 1%; The net profit attributable to Baidu (non GAAP) was 7.011 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22%. Baidu's core revenue was 23.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 4%; The net profit attributable to Baidu Core (non GAAP) was 6.628 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 26%.
From the perspective of Baidu's revenue composition, Baidu's online marketing revenue was 17 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3%. In March 2024, the monthly active users of Baidu App reached 676 million, a year-on-year increase of 3%; The non online marketing revenue was 6.8 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 6%.
Robin Lee, co-founder and CEO of Baidu, said in the annual report that the online marketing revenue of Baidu's core business remained stable, and Baidu's end-to-end optimization of the AI technology stack continued to drive the growth of intelligent cloud revenue in the first quarter.
On the conference call after the financial report on the evening of May 16, Robin Lee revealed that the revenue of intelligent cloud business in the first quarter of this year reached 4.7 billion yuan, up 12% year on year, while the revenue from generative AI and basic models accounted for 6.9% of the revenue of intelligent cloud business. More and more enterprises developed AI native applications on Baidu's public cloud, which also drove the revenue of intelligent cloud business.
AI is also driving enterprises to improve efficiency. Robin Lee said that as one of Baidu's core pillar businesses, 11% of search results have been generated by AI so far.
Shen Shuan, president of Baidu AI Cloud Business Group, said on the conference call that the growth of Baidu AI Cloud revenue had accelerated since the second half of last year, and the revenue of intelligent cloud in the third quarter and fourth quarter of last year had increased by 11% and 12% respectively year on year.
In terms of intelligent driving, financial report disclosure data shows that in the first quarter of this year, Baidu's autonomous driving travel platform, Radish Run, had approximately 826000 orders for autonomous driving, a year-on-year increase of 25%. As of April 19th this year, Carrot Run has provided over 6 million orders for autonomous driving travel services to the public, and the cumulative mileage of autonomous driving has exceeded 100 million kilometers.
The large model not only measures parameters but also measures prices
As more and more enterprises enter the big model race track, the current 100 model war is in full swing. In May, not only Google, OpenAI and other manufacturers released upgraded big models, but also domestic manufacturers, ByteDance, Tencent and Alibaba Cloud also intensively released iterative updates. On May 14th, Tencent announced a comprehensive upgrade and open source of its hybrid Wenshengtu big model, filling the gap in the advanced architecture of domestic big models in Wenshengtu. On May 9th, Alibaba Cloud officially released the Tongyi Qianwen 2.5.
The price war has also begun in the field of large models. OpenAI has recently released the GPT-4o multimodal large model, which is characterized by faster speed and cheaper prices compared to the GPT-4 Trubo; As soon as the big model of ByteDance beanbag was released, he said at the press conference that its price was 99.3% lower than the mainstream big model at home and abroad.
Baidu is also actively responding to the price war. On the evening of May 15th, Baidu stated, "When using a large model, we should not only look at the price, but also at the overall effect; only by making AI applications more effective, responsive, and distributed more widely can people truly feel the convenience that AI brings to social production."
On April 16, Robin Lee revealed at the Create 2024 Baidu AI Developers Conference that the number of users of ERNIE Bot and Wenxin's big model exceeded 200 million, the average daily API usage also exceeded 200 million, and the number of customers served reached 85000.
On the evening after the financial report was released, Baidu's US stock rose 1.66% to close at $112.59 per share; On the morning of May 17th, Baidu Group's H-shares rose nearly 4%, with the stock price reaching HK $114 per share at one point.
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