What's interesting about Baidu's AI model Ernie is that Baidu and its founder, Robin Li, have been working on AI for a long time. Robin Li has a strong background in AI research going back many years. Also notable is that some of the key early research on scaling laws—important for understanding how AI models improve as they get bigger—was done by Baidu's AI lab. This shows Baidu's significant role in the ongoing development of AI.
Here’s a true story I find funny about scaling laws at Baidu.
From 2016-17 I did a projection using our scaling law equation with my coauthors about how many GPUs it would take to train an LLM with a step function in capability. Joel Hestness in particular did excellent experimental work to enable this.
I came out with a projection of about a $1 Billion GPU budget.
Baidu was in the middle of downsizing the US research center (SVAIL) in favor of AI in China and I was participating in the layoff of many of my colleagues while trying to keep the lights on long enough to finish our scaling law experiments, which I personally thought would change the world.
I actually wrote a report to Robin explaining the implications of scaling laws and asking for a $1 billion budget to train a Baidu LLM in 2016 and sat on it through 2017.
But I never sent it because I thought it would never have been supported in that environment. I sometimes wonder what Robin would have thought about it and how the world may have been different if Baidu had released ChatGPT.
We may be about to find out because the AI moat filled with simple algorithms and scale seems to be much more shallow than the processor and systems moat.
I have a huge amount of respect for Dario and Ilya for carrying on scaling laws at OpenAI or it may have never seen the light of day.
If there is one problem for the AI community to solve by 2030 I think it is the moat problem.
Do most people feel the way you do? This is one factor out of multitudes of factors representing Chinas rise as a super power that will eclipse the US in technological, economical and military might.
I’m excited but most people are patriotic and I feel things like this or even the whole situation with BYD producing better cars then Tesla is something people take as an attack to their identity. If not an attack it’s definitely represents an eroding of their patriotic identity.
Unfortunately Trump can’t slap a tariff on this. Maybe he can ban it like he was going to do with TikTok? The US really needs to get off its high horse and not associate its identity with being the sole economic super power in the world.
It's not about patriotism. Many people outside the US, myself included, see a problem with authoritarian superpowers per se. Although now that the US is rapidly drifting towards authoritarianism, that just seems like an inevitable future to prepare for.
Agreed. Within the US though a lot of it is definitely patriotism. But even for Europe a new super power on the block is not necessarily a good thing.
Would you prepare for such a future by banning TikTok and placing tariffs on all goods like BYD cars? I would say no. Those acts are done out of patriotism.
Can you source this? Does Russia have immigrants constantly coming in from these countries that claim to dislike it?(this isn't anything about immigration policy)
My workplace is over 50% Hispanic out on the warehouse floor. They are here because they prefer America, not because they hate it.
First I'll say that I say this as my view as a Brazilian, that actually have a very good and default opinion about the U.S, as far as a Brazilian can be.
U.S is an economic powerhouse, Russia isn't. So yes, U.S attracts worldwide immigration. And of course, who goes to the U.S, already go there because... like it. If they didn't liked it, they wouldn't go.
But Latin America population is almost 700 million. Those who go to the U.S are a small minority, and specially from countries that are very much, to be kind, not going well, so they see the U.S as an example to be followed, like the Cubans and Venezuelans in the U.S.
But Latin America isn't only them.
I suggest checking some polls on the subject on China/US, and you'll see majority of latin americans have positive opinion about China¹, with numbers actually similar in some countries to the U.S. While 16% have positive opinions about China in the U.S, it's 61% in Chile.
And of course, I'm not even considering the governments here, which I think should be the main point, as they are the one who will drive the countries relations.Most Latin America governments, see the U.S as a country that would never let another economic world power rise in the Americas continent. Majority of Brazilians believe that Brazil should reduce use of Dollar², and Trump made specific threats to countries that try to avoid dollar.
This view is actually very widespread, but is worse between leftists, the leftists in most part of Latin America are more what we call "Anti-american", because of U.S Operation Condor that imposed right-wing dictatorships in the region. And it goes even newer, as Brazilian former President's Dilma Rousseff was spied back during Obama terms. That was discovered in 2013 or so.
The whole Trump U.S thing in Panama it's because of the growing influence China was getting there, too.
Like 95% of the planet, I'm not American. Like 82% of the planet, I'm not Chinese.
BYD being better than Tesla isn't a matter of patriotism in most of the world. DeepSeek and Baidu can spend as long as they want playing musical chairs/rap battles with Anthropic and OpenAI, it makes no odds to me which wins.
America and China both have politics that have no reason to care for people like me, nor people like my friends, that they are for different reasons and differ in penalties for being an out-group doesn't matter when I'm a foreigner to both, when my antecedent are who the 13 Colonies rebelled against and more recent antecedent forced unwanted opium sales on China.
I think (hope) most folks care less about the “attack on patriotic identity” and are more concerned that what is essentially a dictatorship is rising in power significantly. History has shown dictatorships rarely end well for the general populace and the rest of the world.
Democracy has its flaws, but one of the features that most people prefer is that it can significantly change how it looks and operates to reflect the will of its people without violence.
I don't think this is really true. History mostly just shows that hegemonic powers rarely end well for other countries, and ultimately even for the people under said hegemony. The same will obviously be written of the US in the history books. We've invaded, overthrown, or tried to overthrow so many countries that you'd have a far easier time counting the countries we haven't tried to dominate in one way or the other.
And historically many of the greatest eras under Ancient Greece and Rome were under autocratic systems that advanced humanity by essentially every single metric. For that matter China has been among the most powerful countries in the world countless times - yet I think relatively few would ever know this because it's always been a quite insular nation, and never pursued hegemony in the same way as Western empires. Of course that could change but it seems extremely unlikely. Pursuing the perpetuation of global hegemony has been anything but fruitful for the US, and it should be a great lesson for the rest of the world. Those times, not just of the US - but of any global hegemon, are probably behind us.
We can agree to disagree on hegemonic power being a bigger deal than dictators. But regardless, saying China is insular is ridiculous. They have a very public plan to expand their hegemony by taking over the infrastructure of other nations by way of “developmental loans”.
That article says the exact opposite of what you are claiming. This is the lede paragraph:
"In December 2018, a leaked letter from the Kenyan auditor-general’s office sparked a rumour that Kenya had staked its bustling Mombasa Port as collateral for the Chinese-financed Standard Gauge Railway. Our new research shows why the collateral rumour is wrong."
IMF forces countries to adopt austerity politics[1], causing lower economic activity and often leading to economy shrinkage[2], and forces countries to open their markets to foreign capital, which leads to surplus extraction abroad. Both of those measures lead to impoverishing the country that is taking the loan.
>Democracy has its flaws, but one of the features that most people prefer is that it can significantly change how it looks and operates to reflect the will of its people without violence.
Internally, maybe. But China becoming a de facto supowerpower doesn't mean everyone else becomes Chinese any more than America being a superpower means everyone else becomes American. The salient point for most people is how that superpower balances the carrot of trade and the stick of violence to maintain its hegemony. To that end the US has far worse of a track record than does China.
Unless the implication is that China intends to directly colonize Western countries, which is something only the US is currently threatening to do.
That has been falsely taught to you but the real fight has never been about the type of rule. But rather on the type of economy US and the west hate China not because of how its dictatorship but rather because its economy is not private capital economy that is showing it can succeed without private citizens completely taking over the country.
As in the last 40-50 years is has been the US and western countries that have been involved in bringing down democracies that had slightest socialist tendencies and propped up dictatorships that allowed the companies to exploit the countries resources. So it is not about the type of government rather the type of economy.
>its economy is not private capital economy that is showing it can succeed without private citizens completely taking over the country.
Its economy absolutely is private capital. What it has shown is the dictator is still stronger than the private capital and will react to any threats to the dictator with violence (see: Jack Ma)
> As in the last 40-50 years is has been the US and western countries that have been involved in bringing down democracies that had slightest socialist tendencies and propped up dictatorships that allowed the companies to exploit the countries resources. So it is not about the type of government rather the type of economy.
Ahhh, yes, the Great War of 2021 when the US invaded Sweden, Finland, and Norway for having governments in power that have far more than “even the slightest socialist tendencies”.
> Ahhh, yes, the Great War of 2021 when the US invaded Sweden, Finland, and Norway for having governments in power that have far more than “even the slightest socialist tendencies”.
No, the Great Stupidity of 2025, when the US started officially endorsing the extreme right-wing in the EU and calling for its dismantlement.
How is Sweden, Finland or Norway in any way socialist? I haven't heard anything about seizing the means of production or overthrowing of the capitalist class from them. Unless you treat governments doings stuff as socialism, then I guess they may be.
China started rising when it allowed capitalism in its special economic zones. Private capital had a big part in it. Shenzhen was given that status in the early 80s.
That's like 10% of the story. There are dozens of countries that moved to a more capital oriented economy yet there is only one China. The philipines, Indonesia, Malasia, the whole continent of Africa or South America. All capitalist economies, even neoliberal. Yet none of those countries that "allowed capitalism" come close to 1% of China's GDP. What's the difference? The difference is that in China the Communist Party governs. Society rules over Capital, not the other way around. That made the whole difference.
I do think they made some sound monetary decisions in their financial markets given how much nonsense the US deals with. I do think you are discounting the capitalism side and give too much weight to the governance side though. Really there's more nuance to both our sides, I don't feel internet comments is rly the best way to try and convey it.
Honestly I'm more worried about the US backsliding to full authoritarianism with the usually "spicier" foreign policy. The more politically insular China from the current regime seems stable enough. Xi could have even 15 years left in the tank before succession shenanigans start. Obviously this from a LATAM perspective, I'm not in Taiwan or South Korea, I would be considerably more spooked then.
It has nothing to do with just giving up and going 'Wellp, I guess China wins.'
China and the US are obviously very different culturally in just about every way possible. This difference makes for great competition. Someone in another topic mentioned something that seemed pretty insightful to me - in that where LLM companies failed in the US was in basically becoming clones of each other, whereas DeepSeek (and now perhaps Baidu) were going in a different way, and that way turned out to be better.
US companies will inevitably copy these strategies, one way or the other, as will Chinese companies copy what ends up working well from the US (see their latest rockets looking more than a little inspired by Starship). And the true competitiveness ensures in the end that the main people who will win will not be whichever guy ended up founding an AI company first, but you and I. It's how capitalism is supposed to work - companies beat themselves down into a race to the bottom, and society reaps the rewards. It only gets really messed up when there's no "real" competition, which is an increasingly frequent state of affairs. But that definitely will not be the case here.
Expect the same thing from India in the future as well. Their economy is advancing rapidly, and soon enough we're going to have another 1.4 billion people able to fully utilize the outliers such a population entails to similarly drive things forward in their own unique way. It's a great future for the world as a whole.
https://research.baidu.com/Blog/index-view?id=89
I am excited to see Baidu catchup. It feels like they have earned it. Being very early.