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

Artificial intelligence

Iris Dengin Shenzhen

Published: 7:04pm, 15 Nov 2023

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Chinese tech companies’ repeated launch of various artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (LLMs) is “a huge waste of resources”, according to Baidu’s Robin Li Yanhong, who called on the government to push for greater applications development initiatives that will bring to market more ChatGPT-like services.

Li, the co-founder, chairman and chief executive of Chinese internet search giant Baidu, told his audience at the annual X-Lake Forum in Shenzhen on Wednesday that this frenzy over LLMs – the technology used to train intelligent chatbots like ChatGPT – has resulted in 238 such AI models launched in the country as of October, up from 79 in June. By contrast, there are hardly any successful AI applications that are familiar to the public, he said.

“There are too many big models in China, but too few AI-native applications based on those models,” Li said. AI-native applications are developed on the “unprecedented” capabilities of AI, according to Li, who used the analogy of Tencent Holdings’ super app WeChat as a mobile-native app.

“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.”

Baidu co-founder, chairman and chief executive Robin Li Yanhong speaks at the annual X-Lake Forum in Shenzhen on November 15, 2023. Photo: Handout

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.

In his presentation at the X-Lake Forum, Li criticised recent efforts by unnamed enterprises and cities to hoard advanced semiconductors and build intelligent computing centres as part of plans to build their own AI foundation models from scratch. He indicated that these new models would have no “emergent abilities” – referring to capabilities to perform a task via a few prompts – owing to a lack of parameter scale and training data sets.

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An LLM’s capability partly hinges on its number of parameters, a measure of the sophistication of a model. OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, was trained on 175 billion parameters, while most open-sourced Chinese LLMs in the market have between 6 and 13 billion parameters.

The government should support the demand side and encourage companies to deploy big models for building new AI applications, according to Li.

Still, OpenAI recently introduced its LLM update, GPT-4 Turbo, which is expected to ignite a race among Chinese Big Tech rivals – including Baidu and Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post – to catch up on this latest development.

China’s major tech firms and AI start-ups have been engaged in an intense competition to provide their own ChatGPT-like services, as OpenAI’s popular chatbot and rival services like Google’s Bard are not officially available in mainland China or Hong Kong. OpenAI backer Microsoft Corp, however, has been pushing its GPT-4-powered Bing Chat in the region.

OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo likely to spark more competition among Chinese rivals

Baidu was the first major tech firm in China to launch its own AI chatbot, Ernie Bot, in March. Ernie Bot was made available to the general public in August after receiving government approval. It now has a total user base of 45 million and 54,000 developers, the company said last month.

In October, Baidu unveiled Ernie Bot 4.0 and claimed that it is as powerful as OpenAI’s GPT-4. The company recently started to monetise the new chatbot by offering a 59.9 yuan (US$8.18) monthly subscription.

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.

“Just like in the [previous] era that gave birth to ‘mobile-native’ apps like WeChat, Douyin and Uber, in the AI era there will definitely be excellent AI-native applications developed based on these big models,” Li said.

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