On February 11, 2025, at the World Governments Summit held in Dubai, UAE, Baidu founder Robin Li engaged in an in-depth dialogue with UAE AI Minister Omar Sultan Al Olama, discussing the future development trends of AI infrastructure.
During the conversation, Al Olama mentioned the recent global attention surrounding DeepSeek, which caused significant fluctuations in the stock prices of several major chip manufacturers and exchanges. He asked Robin Li for his views on the future of data centers and AI infrastructure. Robin Li stated that despite rapid technological advancements and decreasing costs, continued investment in AI infrastructure is crucial to remain at the forefront of technological innovation. He believes that technological progress and cost reduction are the most important themes currently, and to ensure a leading position in this technological innovation revolution, there must be ongoing investment in chips, data centers, and cloud infrastructure to build better and smarter next-generation models.
Robin Li further pointed out that finding more efficient training pathways requires significant computational power for experimentation, which may lead to substantial upfront investments. However, once shortcuts are discovered, it could significantly reduce training costs. Al Olama expressed concern, likening this to the gambler's dilemma, where after investing heavily, one faces pressure to recoup costs. Robin Li, on the other hand, remained optimistic, noting that large language models have already created substantial value in various scenarios and highlighted that Baidu has hundreds of thousands of clients using large models to enhance efficiency in areas such as recruitment, e-commerce, and healthcare.
At the same time, Robin Li acknowledged that while many application cases have been seen in the B2B sector, there has yet to be a super application in the B2C sector akin to those from the mobile internet era or social media. He stated that the entire world is eagerly searching for such a super app, and while applications like ChatGPT perform well, they still have a long way to go before becoming true super applications.
