Baidu Create 2024: What Baidu Is Betting on for Developers

Jiang Wu · 2024-04-16

*Originally published in Chinese on April 16, 2024.*

Baidu Create is Baidu's developer conference, and the latest launch event was aimed entirely at developers. These notes follow what stood out to me.

Everyone a developer

Everything announced was built around one question: how to let developers build products on Baidu's models or ecosystem more easily, and push the barrier to building as low as possible. I counted by hand and found 7,683 applications on PaddlePaddle, Baidu's open-source deep learning platform. How active they are is unknown.

Lowering the barrier at the foundation

The base development layer: Baidu's system base is packaged to work out of the box, which lowers the barrier to development and to commercial delivery.

Three tools for three kinds of customer

Baidu pushed three development tools this time. AgentBuilder builds agents, AppBuilder builds AI-native applications, and ModelBuilder customizes models of various sizes. They map to three kinds of customer, or to customers of different scale. A small product that has nothing yet can simply build an agent. A product with users and a scenario can migrate to AI-native. One with users, a scenario and data can customize its own model. Each kind of customer chooses according to actual needs, and the tools can be mixed.

Wanyuan: private deployment for the largest customers

Intelligent Cloud Wanyuan (an AI system? A white-label of a large system vendor?)

This is not for ordinary users. It is delivered to the very large customers that need private deployment, that have dedicated requirements for data and scenarios but do not want to go to the cloud or buy third-party services. I have doubts about delivery for now. The problem is not technology. Orders in this field come with too many extra factors.

ERNIE Bot's numbers

API calls of 200 million a day (a figure to use when estimating revenue).

ERNIE Bot launched on March 16 last year, which makes it one year and one month old as of April 16, 2024. It has passed 200 million users, and daily API calls have also passed 200 million. It serves 85,000 customers, and more than 190,000 AI-native applications have been built on the Qianfan platform.

What the customer count says about developers

My blind guess is that most of the 85,000 customers' consumption comes from Baidu's own products. External products with large user bases mostly have their own models, and small and mid-sized developers mix models from several vendors. So if you treat that number as an upper bound, you can estimate how many developers are really building products with the model today.

Duer OS: the home as an entry point

Duer OS, Baidu's AI hardware interaction system (it defines the interaction system. What will be the first entry point for AI?)

Xiaodu's user base is still growing, and Baidu distributes through a very wide range of channels. With model capability added, Duer OS is very likely to become a model-powered entry point to the home. It has solved interaction and connectivity. If general-purpose hardware is a beautiful dream, there is still a lot to dig out in hardware for specific scenarios, in the home and beyond it, in healthcare and in education. An open question: if a classroom had to have one AI device, what would it be? (If you have an answer, congratulations, you can take it to a leading education company and become its CEO.)

New infrastructure for the AI era

This time Baidu wants to build the new infrastructure of the AI era. Unlike infrastructure in the last cloud era, whose big customers were large enterprises and where small and mid-sized developers made up a very low share of cloud providers' revenue, the thinking now is that AI can rebuild every product development process and service process. The number of small and mid-sized developers and their calls to APIs may then be the next growth point, which is why Baidu is pulling developers in so hard.

What Baidu may do next

What is the next key move? Baidu needs a well-known product to grow within the Baidu Cloud system, or at least show what the platform can do. My blind guess is distribution of its API through every channel, an announcement that active developers on its platform have passed one million, a claim that API call volume ranks first in the industry, and a series of traffic-entry support policies.

Is it open source?

Is it open source? In substance it already is. Letting people build their own capabilities is already a form of open source, and the standard is not simply whether code is published on GitHub. One thing to discuss: why did the boss say publicly that he does not endorse open source as a form?

What big companies compete on next

What will be the next competitive mechanism for big companies? (The question is too large, and I am already reflecting on why I am thinking about it.)

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