Baidu's Q2 2024 financial report shows that the company's total revenue reached 33.9 billion yuan, remaining largely flat compared to the same period last year. The net profit attributable to Baidu was 5.5 billion yuan, while under non-U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, the net profit was 7.4 billion yuan. During the subsequent earnings call, Baidu's senior management team provided an interpretation of the key financial highlights and answered questions from analysts.
Baidu's Chairman and CEO, Robin Li, emphasized during the meeting that the field of artificial intelligence will face intense competition within the next two to three years. He believes that those companies that can achieve profitability will be the ones to survive the competition. Baidu's decade-long investment in artificial intelligence has given it a first-mover advantage and a leading position. Robin Li specifically mentioned that the daily call volume of Baidu's Wenxin large model exceeds 600 million times, with its text processing capabilities leading in China.
Baidu's intelligent cloud business achieved a 14% year-over-year growth this quarter, driven by strong demand across various industries for generative artificial intelligence and large language models. The growth of the intelligent cloud business is partly due to Baidu's leading position in artificial intelligence infrastructure and its efforts in reducing model inference costs, expanding model portfolios, and developing toolkits.
In the search business, Baidu is leveraging the Wenxin large model to accelerate the upgrade and transformation of its search business. Currently, 18% of search results are provided by generative artificial intelligence, which are more comprehensive and relevant compared to traditional search results. Baidu has also launched the Wenxin intelligent body platform, encouraging developers to create intelligent bodies to meet user needs, with the goal of establishing an ecosystem where all developers jointly build an intelligent body network.
Regarding the Robotaxi business, Robin Li stated that Apollo Go, Baidu's self-driving taxi service, has become the world's largest provider of autonomous ride services and has achieved regional break-even in Wuhan. Baidu is open to various business models and partnerships and plans to transition to a lighter asset model in the future to seize market opportunities.