Baidu reports 24 per cent increase in first-quarter revenue to 15.82 billion yuan

Robin Li Yanhong, the chairman and chief executive of Baidu, sees a steady build-up of investments in the Chinese online search giant’s artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives, including autonomous driverless cars, as more milestones are met by the company.

“Our multi-year investment in artificial intelligence, particularly in deep learning, continues to pay dividends across many products,” Li said in a conference call with analysts on Friday.

Baidu Brain, touted to be the world’s largest and most powerful high-performance computer network for online queries, “supports all product lines and now enable us to offer a more relevant result to users, higher click-through rates to customers, faster delivery time for Takeout Delivery [online-to-offline local service], highly naturalistic text-to-speech features for news users, just to name a few”, Li said.

“We believe we are leading in [AI], not only in China but around the world. This enables us to do disruptive things like autonomous driving,” he said

He added that “when the team hits certain milestones over time, [the] budget might go up”.

Nasdaq-listed Baidu successfully tested in December its autonomous driving technology over a 30-kilometre route around Beijing.