(Yicai) May 24 -- The advancement of artificial intelligence technology is progressing too slowly, according to the founder and chief executive of Baidu, a Chinese search engine and AI giant.

“The fear is that AI technology isn’t improving fast enough,” Robin Li said on May 22 at VivaTech, Europe's biggest event dedicated to startups and technology. “Everyone is shocked at how fast the technology has evolved over the past couple of years, but to me, it's still not fast enough.”

Speaking at the event with Maurice Lévy, chairman of French advertising and public relations firm Publicis, Li laid out an expansive vision for the future of AI, believing that it lies in applications.

Many people have overstated the speed at which artificial general intelligence will arrive, believing it is two to five years away, Li said. But it will likely take more than 10 years, he noted.

“An application-driven approach can also propel innovation in the foundation model and speed up the transformation from an internet age to an AI age,” Li said. In China, the focus is increasingly on creating super apps for the AI age or killer AI native apps, he noted, adding that Baidu's Ernie Bot has 200 million users.

The Beijing-based company made two of its Ernie Bot large language models free of charge this week, wading into the price war waging in China’s AI market. Launched in March last year, the chatbot was made available to the public last August.

A new format should come out that will become increasingly popular and reach more than 100 million daily active users, Li said when asked about his expectations for the emergence of such a new format to harness AI's power and align with consumer demand.

In the mobile age, apps like Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok have a few hundred million to a billion daily active users, but AI native apps still lag behind, Li pointed out.

“What kind of AI native apps will be able to reach the 100 million user mark? What's the right format? Is that just a chatbot, or is that a co-pilot, or is it something else we don't know?” Li asked. 

“What kind of product format is the right one that can fully take advantage of the power of generative AI and can be used on a daily basis by everyone, by billions of people, right?” he said. “We just don't know that yet."

“If AI can be as good as humans, it can solve the population problem,” Li noted when discussing the opportunity for countries if they harness the power of AI well.

France has around 80 million people, and its gross domestic product is "everyone's productivity times your total population,” Li said. “But when you have generative AI or AGI, you can have the productivity of eight billion people. That's huge!”

Companies such as Baidu must ensure that AI develops in a socially responsible fashion, Li said during a visit to the Elysee Palace on May 21, when he was a guest of French President Emmanuel Macron alongside tech entrepreneurs and investors.

VivaTech runs from May 22 to tomorrow at Expo Porte de Versailles.

Editor: Martin Kadiev