Image Source : China Visual

BEIJING, January 10 (TMTPOST) —— The commercialization of AI will have to grope in the dark for a while, according to the speech made by Robin Li, known as Li Yanhong in China, Baidu's founder at the company's 2023 Create AI developer conference on Tuesday.

Li believes that since the digital transformation has not been fully completed and the efficiency improvement brought by digitization is not obvious, there is not yet a broad consensus on the great boosting effect of intelligence on the real economy.

Li described the challenges ahead in the development of AI by referring to his own experience of returning to China in early 2000 to start his own business, only to catch the dot-com bubble bursting. “In the end, it was those who persevered through the winter that made the Internet a golden decade, and such ups and downs in history will continue to occur in the future development of AI," he said.

Li also pointed out that AI has made breakthroughs in both technology and commercial applications in the past year. On the technical level, artificial intelligence has evolved from simple content understanding to automatic content generation and can create works such as texts and videos. As for commercialization, in the past year, the Baidu L4 level autonomous taxi Apollo Go started operation in more than 10 cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. The whole car unmanned commercial operation also started in Chongqing and Wuhan.

Applications in the area of intelligent transportation are also a focus of Baidu's deployment, with the company claiming that its smart transportation solutions have been implemented in 63 cities. Li once again proposed that through the intelligent transformation of the traffic system, traffic efficiency will be greatly improved. Before 2027, China's first-tier cities will no longer need to restrict car purchases and traffic, and the congestion problem will be solved before 2032.