On April 16th, the Create 2024 Baidu(BIDU) AI Developer Conference took place in Shenzhen, where Baidu’s founder, chairman, and CEO Robin Li delivered a keynote speech titled “Everyone Is a Developer.” He believes that large models and generative AI will fundamentally transform the developer community.
“AI is ushering in a creativity revolution, where developing applications will be as simple as making a short video. Everyone is a developer, everyone is a creator.”
Baidu has prepared three “ready-to-use” tools for developers, including the intelligent agent development tool AgentBuilder, the AI-native application development tool AppBuilder, and the model customization tool ModelBuilder of various sizes. “These three tools represent advanced productivity.”
It is worth mentioning that Robin Li shared Baidu’s specific approach to developing AI-native applications on-site and stated, “This is what Baidu has learned from countless pitfalls and paid a high price for over the past year.” The three approaches to developing AI-native applications are MoE, small models, and intelligent agents.
During the conference, Robin Li officially launched the tool version of the Wenxin large model 4.0. He also revealed that the number of Wenxin Yiyen users has exceeded 200 million. “The Wenxin large model has become China’s leading and most widely used AI basic model.”
Thanks to the power of the Wenxin large model, developers can create smaller models through dimensionality reduction and pruning in Wenxin 4.0, which perform significantly better than directly using open-source models of the same size. At the same performance level, the cost is significantly lower. “People used to think open source was cheaper, but in the context of large models, open source is the most expensive. So open-source models will become increasingly outdated.”
This announcement highlights Baidu’s commitment to providing developers with accessible and efficient tools to drive innovation and creativity in the AI space.