‘We’re not that far behind.’ Baidu’s Robin Li on China’s push to diffuse AI throughout society
- Jan 26
- 1 min read
We take an application-driven approach when we try to develop our own foundation model, namely Ernie Bot. Especially for the 5.0 version, we didn't try to be everything for everyone.
We have application areas that we care about a lot—for example, search or digital humans. For these kinds of areas, whatever capability it requires from the foundation model level, we will try to train the model to be good at those skills.
For example, I think our model is very good at instruction following and also creative writing—we were rated number one for creative writing. Because these kinds of capabilities can be used as a digital human layer, especially when you try to let digital humans do live streaming, e-commerce.
To sell things, you need to come up with scripts that are really convincing, so that people are willing to pay for goods. So we try to optimize the model for those kinds of application scenarios.
We think going forward, no foundation model can be better than anyone at any aspect. OpenAI cannot do that; Google Gemini cannot achieve that. We cannot achieve that either—but we try to optimize the model so that it performs better at the directions our applications care about the most.
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