Baidu founder Robin Li casts AI as the driver of China’s ‘new productive forces’
Lining up with Beijing’s ‘AI Plus’ campaign, Li says artificial intelligence is set to underpin China’s next phase of growth
Chinese search engine and artificial intelligence pioneer Baidu is casting AI as the engine of China’s push for “new productive forces”, touting the emerging technology as a linchpin of Beijing’s economic growth drive.
Baidu stock price gained 2.2 per cent in Hong Kong on Thursday morning to $HK113.6 in intraday trading, before paring gains to close at HK$111.2, down 0.2 per cent for the day.
Li wrote in the opinion piece that Baidu was a key AI power in China, putting its own Ernie model family on par with DeepSeek, the Chinese AI start-up whose low-cost models have shaken up the global large language model market.
Baidu’s Ernie family – short for “Enhanced Representation through kNowledge IntEgration” – is the company’s flagship line of large language and multimodal models, powering its Ernie Bot chatbot and a range of cloud and enterprise AI services.
“Baidu … has the responsibility, the capability and the confidence to lead this transformation,” Li said, pledging to increase the company’s AI investment to develop frontier AI infrastructure and AI model technology.