Robin Li Responds to Baidu's "Early Start, Late Finish": Cannot Expect All Innovations to Succeed

In an interview, Robin Li addressed a topic of significant public interest: "Of course, when people say we 'start early but finish late,' it isn't offensive—some of it is true. I've even encouraged internal discussions about why we 'start early but finish late.'"

Robin Li stated, "We cannot expect all innovation attempts to succeed. The nature of innovation is that most initiatives fail, and we must accept this reality. For instance, if Baidu launches ten different innovation projects and nine fail, I consider that normal. They are meant to fail—statistically, failure is expected. If one succeeds, that is already excellent."

He added, "On the other hand, Baidu has had both successes and failures over the years. If there is any pattern, it is that when success depends almost entirely on technological advancement, our probability of success increases significantly. This is especially true when the technology requires many years of investment and iteration—then our chances of success become even greater."

At the Baidu World 2025 Conference, Baidu founder Robin Li shared insights, noting that over the past year, the AI industry has been transitioning from an unhealthy "inverted pyramid" structure to a healthier large-model product architecture. Over the past year, model capabilities have gradually expanded beyond chatbots, with significant advancements in digital human technology, code intelligence agents, and even technologies that autonomously evolve in general scenarios to find the "global optimal solution."

According to previous reports from IT Home, Robin Li officially launched the ERNIE 5.0 model at the conference and announced that Apollo Go's fully unmanned weekly orders have exceeded 250,000, with global ride-hailing services surpassing 17 million trips, making it the world's leader. Its services now cover 22 cities worldwide, with fully unmanned driving mileage exceeding 140 million kilometers and total autonomous driving mileage surpassing 240 million kilometers.