Baidu forecasts AI revenue growth and limited short-term impact from US chip curbs
- Baidu CEO Robin Li said the company has enough AI chips to continue developing its Ernie large language model for the next two years
- Baidu reportedly placed an order for domestically-made AI chips from China’s Huawei Technologies as a potential Nvidia alternative
Baidu has a stockpile of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chips to soften the short-term impact of US export curbs, the Chinese tech giant said as it forecast increased AI revenues in its third-quarter results.
In an earnings call on Tuesday, Baidu co-founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li Yanhong said the company expects to have enough AI chips to continue developing its Ernie large language model (LLM) for the next two years as it races to keep up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“The restrictions on chip exports to China actually have limited impact on Baidu in the near term,” he said, adding “we believe our chip reserves as well as other alternatives will be sufficient to support a lot of AI native apps for our end users”.
Li did not provide details on potential alternative chip sources but said that while these options were not as advanced as those in the US, Baidu’s “unique AI architecture and strengths in algorithms” would continue to help mitigate challenges and improve efficiency.
However, Li said US sanctions on exports of advanced AI chips to China by key companies like Nvidia would “inevitably impact the pace of AI development in China”, and could lead to a consolidation of Chinese AI companies around leading LLMs.
