Chinese tech companies’ frenzy over AI large language models ‘a huge waste of resources’, Baidu CEO says
- There are too many large language models being launched in China, but too few AI-native applications are in development, according to Baidu’s Robin Li
- He called on the government to push policies that would encourage the creation of more AI-native applications to help drive economic growth
“Developing foundation models continuously and repeatedly is a huge waste of social resources,” he said. “We need 1 million AI-native applications, but we don’t need 100 big models.”
LLMs are deep-learning AI algorithms that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate content using very large data sets.
“If our industry policies can be more encouraging on [creating more] AI-native applications based on the big models, we will surely create a prosperous AI ecosystem and drive a new round of economic growth,” Li said.
Li’s remarks extolled AI’s potential to help drive economic growth and become a useful daily tool, while urging China’s technology industry to be more circumspect in developing the technology to meet those goals.
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The government should support the demand side and encourage companies to deploy big models for building new AI applications, according to Li.
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At the X-Lake Forum, Li claimed that Ernie Bot’s application programming interface call volume has shown “exponential growth” since its August launch, which “exceeded the other 200 models in combination”.
Baidu is currently incubating its own AI applications, such as the code-writing assistant Comate, Li said. Still, he asserted that the best AI-native applications have yet to be developed either in China or the US.