ERNIE Bot has more than 200 million users!
On April 16, at the Create 2024 Baidu AI Developers Conference, Robin Lee, founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, said: "In the future, natural language will become a new universal programming language. As long as you can speak, you can become a developer and change the world with your creativity."
Robin Lee said that today's China has 1 billion Internet users, a strong basic model, enough AI application scenarios, the most complete industrial system in the world, and the country is also vigorously encouraging and supporting the "AI+" action. Every person and every enterprise can unleash unlimited creativity and productivity by fully utilizing these tools.
ERNIE Bot has more than 200 million users, and AI has become a new engine for Baidu's performance
"ERNIE Bot was released on March 16 last year, and today is one year and one month. Our number of users has exceeded 200 million, the average daily API usage has also exceeded 200 million, the number of customers served has reached 85000, and the number of AI native applications developed using the Qianfan platform has exceeded 190000." Robin Lee said at this Baidu AI developer conference.
It is understood that on December 28, 2023, Baidu CTO Wang Haifeng had announced that ERNIE Bot's user scale had exceeded 100 million, and ERNIE Bot became the first large-scale model product in China that announced its user scale had exceeded 100 million.
At the end of last year, the user base exceeded 100 million, and now the user base has exceeded 200 million. This means that the number of ERNIE Bot users has doubled in just over three months.
In terms of commercialization, ERNIE Bot also continues to explore. Guojin Securities Research News said that in November 2023, ERNIE Bot will launch a membership package at a price of 59.9 yuan/month or 658.8 yuan/year, and the price of joint members who use Baidu images to generate a big model Wenxin Yige will be 99 yuan/month. Compared to the free version, the membership package can call the latest version 4.0 large model, support longer input and output lengths, provide content reference sources, and unlimited command polishing functions. According to the statistics of aicpb.com, ERNIE Bot ranked first in terms of the number of visits to domestic AI products for a second time. In November 2023, the number of visits reached 13.59 million, and the membership subscription model is expected to further bring about realized income.
In addition to ERNIE Bot, Robin Lee also shared the progress of Radish Run in the field of unmanned driving. Previously, in 2017, when Robin Lee attended the Baidu AI Developers Conference, he got a ticket from the Beijing traffic police for using the driverless function and speeding on the Beijing Fifth Ring Road with his hands off the steering wheel. That year Robin Lee said: "The ticket for driverless driving has come, will mass production of unmanned vehicles be far behind?"
According to Robin Lee, after the Spring Festival this year, Baidu's Radish Run has achieved the "first leap" across the Yangtze River, extending its services from the north bank to the south bank of the Yangtze River. In some areas of Wuhan, it has achieved 7X24 hours of all-weather operation. Meanwhile, the Carrot Run plan is to deploy 1000 unmanned vehicles in Wuhan within the year.
"This is a landmark event for the real commercialization of automatic driving. It is no longer just a regional demonstration, but has entered a new stage of city level application demonstration. Radish Run covers more than 3000 square kilometers and 7.7 million people in Wuhan, making it the largest autonomous driving operation area in the world," said Robin Lee.
In 2023, Baidu achieved impressive performance, and the commercialization of AI models and autonomous driving are expected to become new engines of performance in the future. According to the financial report, Baidu's total revenue in 2023 reached 134.6 billion yuan, with a net profit of 28.7 billion yuan under non GAAP accounting standards, a year-on-year growth rate of 39%.
Robin Lee said: "In 2023, we will make significant progress in iterating ERNIE Bot's big model and Wenxin's one word, restructuring products and services, and commercialization. At the same time, Baidu's core business will remain resilient and healthy. Looking ahead, we will continue to firmly invest in generative AI and basic models, laying the foundation for creating new growth engines."
"Paid high tuition", Robin Lee shared AI development ideas and tools
At this conference, Robin Lee shared the specific ideas and tools Baidu has put into practice in the past year to develop AI native applications. He said, "The big language model itself does not directly create value. AI applications developed based on big models can meet real market demand. Today, I want to share with you some specific ideas and tools for developing AI native applications based on big models. This is what we have achieved through countless pitfalls and high tuition fees based on our practice over the past year."
From the perspective of specific tools and ideas, Robin Lee mainly shared three points: MoE, small models and agents.
Robin Lee said that the large AI native applications in the future are basically MoE. The MoE referred to here is not a general academic concept, but a mixture of large and small models that do not rely on a single model to solve all problems.
Next is the small model. Robin Lee said that small models have low reasoning cost and fast response speed. In some specific scenarios, the use effect of small models after fine tuning can be comparable to that of large models. This is why Baidu has released three lightweight models: Ernie Speed, Ernie Lite, and Ernie Tiny. Robin Lee said: "We use a large model to compress and distill a basic model, and then use data to train it. This is much better than training a small model from scratch. Compared with the model based on the open source model, it has better effect, faster speed and lower cost."
The third is intelligent agents. Robin Lee said that agent is a very hot topic at present. With the improvement of agent's ability, a large number of AI native applications will continue to emerge. The mechanism of intelligent agents, including understanding, planning, reflection, and evolution, enables machines to think and act like humans, autonomously complete complex tasks, continuously learn, achieve self iteration, and self evolution in the environment. In some complex systems, Baidu can also enable different intelligent agents to interact, collaborate with each other, and complete tasks with higher quality. We have developed these intelligent agent capabilities and are fully open to developers.
"Agents may be the most popular way to use large models that are closest to everyone in the future. Based on a powerful basic model, agents can be generated in batches and applied in a variety of scenarios. Baidu has just upgraded the Wenxin agent platform. So far, more than 30000 agents have been created, more than 50000 developers and tens of thousands of enterprises have settled in. Our goal is to make every person and organization become an agent developer and create the most complete agent ecosystem in China." Robin Lee said.
Robin Lee said, "Today, every business and every customer can have their own agent in Baidu. The whole process does not require programming at all. Through information input like prompt words and simple steps of operation optimization, an agent can be quickly generated and become a gold medal salesperson who is online for 7X24 hours."
On the scene of the conference, Robin Lee demonstrated three agent cases of Singapore Tourism Administration, Kai Tak Education and Sophia. It is reported that Qide Education used Baidu's AgentBuilder to create an exclusive intelligent agent. In the first week of its launch, it successfully distributed 1.55 million times and interacted with users 58000 times. The conversion volume of leads increased sharply, the conversion cost of effective leads significantly decreased, and business efficiency significantly improved.
"Since the launch of Sophia merchant agent, the cost of effective leads has dropped by 30%. That is to say, if it used to cost 100 yuan to obtain an effective customer, it only needs 70 yuan now." Robin Lee said.
ERNIE Bot 4.0 tool release, everyone can become a developer
At the conference, Robin Lee officially released the tool version of Wenxin Model 4.0.
Robin Lee said: "Now you can experience the function of code interpreter on the tool version. Through natural language interaction, you can process and analyze complex data and files. You can also generate charts or files, which can quickly insight into the characteristics of data, analyze change trends, and provide efficient and accurate support for subsequent decisions."
According to Robin Lee, compared with a year ago, the algorithm training efficiency of Wenxin Large Model has increased to 5.1 times, the weekly average training efficiency has reached 98.8%, the reasoning performance has improved 105 times, and the reasoning cost has decreased to 1%. That is to say, the customer used to call 10000 times a day, but now they can call 1 million times at the same cost.
"We can reduce the reasoning cost to 1% while improving the performance, precisely because Baidu has a full stack layout in the four tier architecture of chips, frameworks, models, and applications. Through end-to-end optimization, we continue to drive down the cost, so that more people can use large models to do AI applications efficiently and cheaply." Robin Lee said.
Robin Lee believes that AI is setting off a creative revolution. Developing applications in the future is as simple as taking short videos. Everyone will become a developer.