“Bubbles are inevitable once the initial excitement wears off,” Baidu CEO Robin Li said at the Harvard Business Review’s Future of Business conference. “It’s healthy because it washes away all the fake innovations or products that don’t fit the market.”

vcbwa3pr.png
Baidu CEO Robin Li predicts that only 1% of AI companies will survive and grow into "giants". Photo: Baidu

He predicts that “only 1%” of AI businesses will survive and grow, creating value for people and society. He also believes that it will be 10 to 30 years before technology replaces human work.

“Businesses, organizations and ordinary people need to prepare for this paradigm shift,” he said.

The “illusion” created by large language models is no longer a problem, according to Baidu CEO. “The most significant change in the last 18-20 months is the accuracy of the answers coming from large language models. I think in the last 18 months, that problem has been solved quite a bit, which means that when you talk to a chatbot, you can basically trust it.”

In China, Robin Li's home country, Baidu and other tech giants as well as dozens of startups all released their own AI models last year.

Some startups have raised large sums of capital from big names like Alibaba and Tencent. However, the question this year is how long startups can continue to rely on investor money, given the difficulty of generating revenue in such a “crowded” domestic market.

(According to The Information, The Register)