Beijing time, February 28th, Baidu released its financial report for the fourth quarter and the whole year of 2023, showing that the total revenue for 2023 reached 134.598 billion yuan, with net profit attributable to Baidu (non-GAAP) of 28.7 billion yuan, a year-on-year growth rate of 39%; the fourth quarter revenue was 34.951 billion yuan, with net profit attributable to Baidu (non-GAAP) of 7.755 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 44%. In 2023, Baidu's annual revenue and profit both exceeded market expectations.

AI has become a new driving force for Baidu's growth. The financial report shows that Baidu's core revenue in 2023 was 103.465 billion yuan, with net profit attributable to Baidu's core (non-GAAP) of 27.4 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 38%; in December 2023, the monthly active user number of the Baidu App reached 667 million. As of January 2nd, 2024, the total service volume of Luobo Kuaibao exceeded 5 million orders; in the fourth quarter, the number of Luobo Kuaibao service orders increased by 49% year-on-year to 839,000 orders, with the proportion of fully unmanned driving orders in the Wuhan area reaching 45%.

Advertisement

Robin Li, Baidu's founder, chairman, and CEO, said: "In 2023, we made significant progress in iterating the Wenxin large model and Wenxin Yiyan, reconstructing products and services, and commercialization. At the same time, Baidu's core business maintained resilience and healthy development. Looking forward, we will continue to firmly invest in generative AI and basic models, laying the foundation for creating new growth engines."

Baidu's CFO, Luo Rong, said: "Over the past year, we have continued to focus on improving operational efficiency; in 2024, we will continue to enhance operational efficiency and achieve high-quality growth."

Wenxin large model API calls rank first in the country, and cooperation has been reached with China Samsung, Honor, and others.

In 2023, the usage of Wenxin Yiyan and the API calls of the Wenxin large model both maintained rapid growth. Public data shows that as of the end of December 2023, the user scale of Wenxin Yiyan exceeded 100 million; Robin Li said in his speech in November last year that there are more than 200 large models in China, "the API calls of the Wenxin large model alone are more than the sum of the API calls of these more than 200 large models."

The Wenxin large model has brought a new performance growth space for Baidu. In the fourth quarter, leading enterprises such as China Samsung, Honor, and Auto Home all reached cooperation with Baidu. Taking Samsung as an example, its latest flagship mobile phone series Galaxy S24 integrates multiple capabilities of the Wenxin large model, including calls, translation, intelligent summarization, etc., especially the "circle and search" feature is highly anticipated. Users can simply circle and draw lines on text and pictures with simple gestures to obtain accurate search results.

At the same time, the technology application of the Wenxin large model and the PaddlePaddle community ecosystem form a "flywheel effect." The financial report shows that PaddlePaddle has gathered 10.7 million developers, serving 235,000 enterprises and institutions, and has created 860,000 models based on PaddlePaddle. In the PaddlePaddle Star River community, innovative applications based on Wenxin Yiyan have exceeded 4,000, covering many scenarios such as market marketing, education and training, and intelligent office.

AI reconstruction releases commercial potential, with annual online marketing revenue of 75.1 billion.

In the past year, Baidu has fully promoted the AI-native reconstruction of its products and services, launching AI-native applications such as Baidu New Search, Baidu New Wenku, and Wenxin Yiyan App, as well as AI marketing tools such as Qingge and Brand Intelligence. The financial report shows that in December 2023, the monthly active user number of the Baidu App reached 667 million, and the annual online marketing revenue in 2023 was 75.1 billion yuan, with the fourth quarter online marketing revenue of 19.2 billion yuan.Feihong and many other companies have begun to use AI-native marketing tools reconstructed based on the Wenxin large model. Taking Feihong, the leading brand in Chinese infant formula, as an example, the "Feihong Official Intelligent Assistant" built based on the brand intelligence unit can provide more accurate and personalized services to users through multi-round dialogues.

Baidu Wenku has been reconstructed into a "one-stop AI content creation platform," offering intelligent document, PPT, mind map, research report, and other multi-content generation and editing, multi-language document summary Q&A, and merged reference generation, among other AI capabilities. Combined with the full-scene application of natural language instructions, it greatly enhances the efficiency and quality of content creation. According to public data, the number of AI users on Baidu Wenku has exceeded 80 million, and the number of times new features have been used has exceeded 700 million. A report from the National Information Security Center shows that in the field of PPT generation, Baidu Wenku ranks first with a score of 86 and leads in multiple indicators such as generation quality and intent understanding.

The inference cost of the Wenxin large model has been reduced to 1%, and two major tools have been launched on the Intelligent Cloud to improve development efficiency. Thanks to the continuous optimization at each level of Baidu's unique four-layer AI architecture, the inference cost of the Wenxin large model has continued to decline, and the training efficiency has continued to improve. Robin Li revealed in a previous event that from March 2023 to the end of December, the inference cost of the Wenxin large model has basically been reduced to 1% of the original. At the same time, through the joint optimization of PaddlePaddle and Wenxin, the model's weekly training efficiency has exceeded 98%.

To further improve the development efficiency of AI-native applications and models, Baidu Intelligent Cloud has launched two major tools: Qianfan AppBuilder and Qianfan ModelBuilder. As an AI-native application development workbench, AppBuilder not only provides developers with a rich set of development kits and application components but also offers a lower barrier low-code state. Users who do not understand code can also quickly create their own AI-native applications through natural language.

Qianfan ModelBuilder brings a complete set of large model development toolchains, supporting the development and fine-tuning of proprietary models. Currently, Qianfan ModelBuilder has accumulated fine-tuning of 10,000 models, providing developers with a complete large model solution that combines proprietary models with basic large models.