Baidu founder Robin Li casts AI as the driver of China’s ‘new productive forces’

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.\n“AI, as a key driver of the new wave of technological and industrial transformation, is vital for accelerating the emergence of new quality productive forces and achieving high-quality economic and social development,” said Robin Li Yanhong, founder and chief executive at Beijing-based Baidu, in a bylined commentary published on Thursday in the state-run People’s Daily.\nBeijing is currently rolling out its “AI Plus” strategy – a State Council initiative that aims to integrate AI across the economy and public services – in which China’s technology giants, including Baidu, are expected to play significant roles.\nBaidu stock price gained 2.2 per cent in Hong Kong on Thursday morning to $HK113.6.\nLi 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.\nBaidu’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.\n“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.\n\nThe article came two days after Baidu reported a 50 per cent increase year on year in AI-related revenue in the three months ended September, a bright spot in an otherwise lacklustre quarter.\nThe company said sales at its AI-related cloud infrastructure, applications and marketing services rose to 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion), laying “a solid foundation for sustainable long-term growth”.\nLi wrote in the commentary that AI could be applied across traditional sectors and business scenarios, from live streaming e-commerce, online sales and customer service to autonomous driving and assistive coding.\n“Leveraging the power of AI could help enterprises cut costs, improve revenue, make better decisions and find new growth opportunities,” he said.\nHe called on “companies from thousands of industries and hundreds of sectors to internalise AI and develop AI-native capabilities”, saying wider adoption of the technology would help grow the “intelligence industry” and accelerate the upgrade of conventional sectors.\nBaidu’s push comes amid intense competition in China’s AI market, where rivals such as Alibaba Group Holding – owner of the Post – and Tencent Holdings are also racing to build out their own tech stacks and commercialise large models.\n