At Baidu's first quarter financial report conference, which just ended on May 16, Robin Lee, CEO of Baidu, revealed that the Wenxin model is being integrated into more and more smart devices
According to the disclosure, the average daily processing of Token texts by Wenxin Big Model has reached about 250 billion, with an average daily call volume of 200 million times. As of December last year, this data was only 50 million times. Robin Lee said in the financial report conference call, "One of the most important long-term opportunities is model reasoning, which will be the key growth engine of our future AI cloud revenue."
Experts believe that AI is undergoing a comprehensive restructuring of Baidu, not just a simple product or model, but a complete transformation of product logic and beginning to generate positive returns.
On May 16th, Baidu released its first quarter financial report for 2024. Baidu's total revenue for this quarter was RMB 31.5 billion (USD 4.37 billion), a year-on-year increase of 1%. Baidu's core revenue was 23.8 billion yuan (approximately 3.3 billion US dollars), a year-on-year increase of 4%. IQiyi's revenue was 7.9 billion yuan (1.1 billion US dollars), a year-on-year decrease of 5%.
The net profit attributable to Baidu (Non GAAP) was 7.011 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 22%, while the net profit attributable to Baidu's core (Non GAAP) was 6.628 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 26%, exceeding market expectations.
In Baidu's core revenue, online marketing revenue was RMB 17 billion (USD 2.36 billion), a year-on-year increase of 3%, while non online marketing revenue was RMB 6.8 billion (USD 935 million), a year-on-year increase of 6%, mainly driven by the artificial intelligence cloud business.
According to the financial report, the revenue of Baidu AI Cloud's business was 4.7 billion yuan, up 12% year on year, mainly because Baidu Intelligent Cloud was born with AI gene. When products and services were restructured using AI, key progress was made in optimizing profits. The revenue contribution of generative AI in this quarter reached 6.9%.
In the middle of April 2024, the number of developers in PaddlePaddle community has reached 13 million; Baidu has expanded the Wenxin Big Model and launched several lightweight large-scale language models in the first quarter of 2024, making the Wenxin Big Model increasingly affordable.
In terms of intelligent driving business, Baidu's autonomous driving ride hailing service, Radish Run, provided approximately 826000 rides in the first quarter of 2024, a year-on-year increase of 25%. As of April 19, 2024, the cumulative number of rides provided by Carrot Run to the public has exceeded 6 million.
From the financial report of the first quarter of 2024, it can be seen that the search business is still the foundation of Baidu, contributing pillar revenue to Baidu. According to data, the monthly active users of Baidu App reached 676 million in March 2024, a year-on-year increase of 3%, and the quarterly online marketing revenue was 17 billion yuan. In the first quarter of 2024, hosted pages accounted for 50% of Baidu's core online marketing revenue.
Some insiders believe that the search engine, as the Internet infrastructure, is also one of the largest AI application scenarios. After the reconstruction of the Wenxin model, Baidu's new search has three characteristics: extreme satisfaction, recommendation stimulation and multiple rounds of interaction. In the current daily existing Q&A requirements on Baidu search, the proportion of first item satisfied has reached 70%, and Baidu search adds over 50 million new Q&A requirements on a daily basis.
At present, more and more search results are generated by AI, and the formats are becoming more diverse, including text, images, third-party links, points of interest, and many other forms. In addition, while improving AI generated search results, Baidu has also added an "interactive" column and changed it to a question and answer style search. This indicates that with the restructuring of AI, the search business has shown new growth momentum.
Not only that, Robin Lee also mentioned that Baidu has been rebuilding all its consumer oriented products and has achieved results. "Our goal is to build our proprietary AI native applications. Only in this way can we create new growth opportunities. For example, after using AI to rebuild, the number of paid users of Baidu Wenku in the first quarter increased by two digits year on year.".
It is worth mentioning that during the financial report conference call, Baidu executives also mentioned changes in competitors' pricing strategies for the AI cloud business. "In fact, it is quite common for cloud suppliers to adjust the pricing of certain products... The Wenxin model processes about 200 million API calls per day, about 250 billion tokens. We believe that the widespread adoption of the Wenxin model will continue to improve its performance, improve efficiency, and further reduce costs."