On March 10, it was reported that Robin Lee, the founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, said in a CCTV program on the evening of March 9 that there will be no such career as "programmer" in the future, because as long as they can speak, everyone can have the ability to be a programmer. "There will only be two programming languages left in the future, one called English and the other called Chinese," Robin Lee said.
Regarding the development of artificial intelligence. "It's a little slower than I expected." Robin Lee said that the word artificial intelligence has been put forward for nearly 70 years. Perhaps every 10 years or so, a wave of people are excited to say that we are finally going to achieve universal artificial intelligence. Later on, it was discovered that it was actually not the case, and the situation was more complex than imagined.
He believes that Baidu was able to resolutely invest in AI more than a decade ago because the problems solved by search itself are exactly the same as those solved by AI. However, "search is fundamentally different from ERNIE Bot." Robin Lee said that at the earliest, search engine technology was actually a statistic, counting word frequency. For example, when searching for "Chen Weihong" and looking for a webpage with the most frequent occurrence of this word, place that webpage at the top. After the invention of "hyperlink analysis", it was found that the website to which the keyword appeared most frequently in a link was the most relevant. Going forward, after using artificial intelligence, we will learn through machine learning. When users search for this word and click on that result, what exactly does it mean. Being clicked multiple times indicates that it is more related to this word.
"When ERNIE Bot came out today, there was another essential change when the big model appeared." He further explained that the big model actually learned all the knowledge of the whole network in advance and compressed it into a model or a lot of parameters. When a user asks a question, it can directly guess the answer to the question based on these parameters. "The working principle behind the big model and traditional search engines is very different."
Young people have less muscle memory in artificial intelligence
When asked about the relationship between ERNIE Bot and ChatGPT, who is easier and more comfortable to use? Robin Lee said that in Chinese, Wenxin 4.0 has exceeded GPT4. "For example, if I write a poem, many big models can write, but if I ask to write a word for the word board of Qinyuan Spring, GPT will be completely confused. It does not know whether the first sentence is four words or five words."
However, he also admitted that objectively speaking, ERNIE Bot does not use as many English training data as foreign advanced big models. "So we insist on comparing the effect of ERNIE Bot with that of ChatGPT."
Speaking of the "Hundred Model War", Robin Lee believed that it was a great waste of social resources. Don't "roll up" big models, roll up "applications. Only when it's necessary can value be truly created directly. At the same time, he emphasized that the true value of the big model is only reflected when creating applications for hundreds of millions of users.
"The Internet has changed a lot of our lives. But this wave of AI changes will be more thorough and profound." As for how the next two years' big models will change human life or production, Robin Lee believes that "basically, there will be no programmers in the future. As long as everyone can speak, or even write, they will have the ability that programmers have today. There will only be two programming languages left in the future: English and Chinese, which are currently the two most advanced artificial intelligence languages in the world. It's still very exciting. "
In addition, Robin Lee said that in the field of artificial intelligence, young people have less muscle memory. They can put aside all kinds of ideological constraints in the past and do something that has never been done before.
It is understood that three years ago, Robin Lee wrote in the Letter to Shareholders when Baidu went back to Hong Kong for listing that Baidu was "able to endure extreme loneliness and hide under the stars and sea". When this sentence was mentioned again in the interview, Robin Lee said, "It's getting closer and closer to getting over it", "I'm very excited to see the dawn and various possibilities coming."