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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
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Iris Dengin Shenzhen
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.”
LLMs are deep-learning AI algorithms that can recognise, summarise, translate, predict and generate content using very large data sets.
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