Baidu announced its financial report for the third quarter of 2024 yesterday, showing total revenue of 33.6 billion yuan, a decrease of 3% compared to the same period last year. In terms of net profit, Baidu's net profit attributable to the company was 7.6 billion yuan, while the non-GAAP net profit was 5.9 billion yuan.
During the subsequent earnings call, Baidu's senior executives, including Chairman and CEO Robin Li, President of the Mobile Ecosystem Group Luo Rong, President of the Intelligent Cloud Group Shen Dou, and Acting CFO He Junjie, provided a detailed interpretation of the report's highlights and answered analysts' questions.
Robin Li emphasized the continuous improvement of Baidu's foundational model capabilities, particularly the development of its flagship model. He mentioned that since the launch of Wenxin Yiyan in March last year, Baidu has been continuously optimizing its foundational model capabilities. In October last year, Baidu released Wenxin 4.0, which is China's first model with world-leading capabilities similar to GPT-4. In June this year, Baidu further launched the higher-performing Wenxin 4.0 Turbo. Li stated that Baidu plans to release a new version of Wenxin (Ernie) early next year to further consolidate the company's leadership in the foundational model field.
Baidu's model development strategy is clearly application-oriented. Li believes that foundational models only have real value when they can support a wide range of applications that meet user needs. Over the past 18 months, Baidu's model development has focused on addressing market demands and practical issues, which has led to significant progress in reducing model "hallucinations" and improving accuracy. Baidu has also launched a series of customized models aimed at making the Wenxin models easier to use and more cost-effective, while enhancing performance, reducing inference costs, and improving response speed.
Li also mentioned that Baidu has expanded its visual foundational model capabilities into the autonomous driving field to further strengthen the company's leading position in this area. Currently, Baidu is actively exploring multimodal capabilities and applications based on the Wenxin language model, aiming to create more collaborative value and unlock new possibilities across various fields. In terms of resource allocation, Baidu is very cautious, optimizing its foundational models to maximize their impact on the business, which helps Baidu maintain its market leadership.
