Baidu released its financial report for the second quarter of 2024 as of June 30 today: The total revenue was 33.9 billion yuan, basically unchanged year-on-year. The net profit attributable to Baidu was 5.5 billion yuan. Excluding US GAAP, the net profit attributable to Baidu was 7.4 billion yuan.
After the release of the financial report, Baidu's chairman and CEO Li Yanhong, CFO Luo Rong, and president of the Intelligent Cloud Business Group Shen Dou and other executives attended the subsequent earnings conference call to interpret the key points of the financial report and answer analysts' questions.
JP Morgan analyst Alex Yao: My question is about the development of artificial intelligence. What does the management think the competitive landscape in the field of artificial intelligence will be like in the next two to three years? Can Baidu's first-mover advantage in the field of artificial intelligence continue? Or will the technological gap between the main competitors narrow over time as artificial intelligence technology further develops? Compared with Kimi intelligent assistant, Doubao intelligent assistant, and the artificial intelligence assistants of Alibaba and Tencent, what does the management think the current competitive landscape is like? In addition, in the opinion of the management, in addition to technological leadership being crucial, what other factors are crucial for the company to establish a sound ecosystem in the field of artificial intelligence?
Li Yanhong: I think in the next two to three years, the competition in the field of artificial intelligence will be very fierce. As for who will be the final winner, my view is that whoever makes money can survive.
Last year, when China's artificial intelligence industry was still in the so-called hundred schools of thought contending period, I once predicted that the artificial intelligence industry would eventually move towards consolidation, and only a few basic large-scale model enterprises could survive. Users have a strong demand for Baidu's generative artificial intelligence products, and we are also very proud to see that Baidu Wenxin Large Model continues to lead the artificial intelligence market. I believe that Baidu will continue to maintain the leading position in the industry.
The reason why I say this is that we have been investing in the field of artificial intelligence for more than a decade, which has also laid a solid foundation for us to occupy the first-mover advantage and obtain the leading position in technology. In March last year, Baidu became the first listed company in the world to launch a ChatGPT-like model. Since then, we have continuously upgraded the model through Baidu's independently developed four-layer architecture of artificial intelligence. In October last year, we launched the Wenxin Large Model 4.0 version, becoming the first large model in China to benchmark against ChatGPT GPT-4; in June this year, we launched the Wenxin Large Model 4.0 Turbo version, and the Turbo version has more powerful functions compared to the Wenxin Large Model 4.0 version. In the future, we will also continue to iterate and upgrade our model continuously on this basis.
Baidu has always adhered to the development concept of application-driven, which has further expanded our competitive advantage and enabled us to stand out among a series of competing products. We always believe that if we cannot develop practical applications on the basic large model, then developing more basic large models is useless. In other words, our large model should be widely applied by users and customers. I have shared with you before that currently the daily invocation volume of Baidu Wenxin Large Model exceeds 600 million times, and it can process 1 trillion tokens of text daily, which should be the highest in the country.
In addition, we have also been con tinuously using the Wenxin Large Model to empower other products of Baidu, such as Baidu Search and Baidu Wenku, and iterating these products into applications with artificial intelligence functions. This has also allowed us to get a lot of valuable feedback from users. This feedback feeds back to the upgrade and iteration of the Wenxin Large Model, and also helps us provide better solutions for external users of the Wenxin Large Model.
We have also been committed to the popularization of the Wenxin Large Model, hoping that more and more users can afford it and let more users use the Wenxin Large Model to solve real-world needs. Therefore, we continue to reduce the cost of model inference, expand the model portfolio, and develop toolkits for model building and application building so that our users, partners, and developers can use the various powerful functions of the Wenxin Large Model more efficiently and effectively.
Baidu's application-driven development concept helps us build a vibrant and continuously expanding ecosystem. As of the end of June this year, Baidu PaddlePaddle and Wenxin Large Model developer community have developed more than 14.7 million people. In addition, currently tens of thousands of enterprises have reached cooperation with us, which also shows the continuously expanding influence and practicability of Baidu's ecosystem from the side.
Looking forward to the future, we will continue to be patient. We will continue to iterate the functions of the Wenxin Large Model to ensure that we can always be at the forefront of the field of artificial intelligence technology. By analyzing the feedback from applications and partners in Baidu's ecosystem, we will effectively use these valuable insights to continuously improve our large model.
I believe that the strong synergy between Baidu's vibrant ecosystem, industry-leading large model functions, and application-driven development concept will burst out strong synergy, so that we can maintain the leading position in the rapidly developing artificial intelligence industry.