Baidu, the tech powerhouse with the strongest presence on autonomous driving, is also starting to shrink its business.

According to Time Finance, Baidu has recently adjusted the organizational structure of Intelligent Driving Group (IDG), and its Intelligent Transportation Division (ACE) has been subsumed into Intelligent Cloud Group (ACG). After the adjustment, IDG's business segments have shrunk from the original three segments of autonomous driving, intelligent vehicles and intelligent transportation to only the first two.

An informed source close to Baidu Cloud confirmed the authenticity of the above adjustment to Box Lunch Finance, and said that all the existing 1,000-plus people of ACE will be merged into ACG.

The main reason for this adjustment is that the intelligent transportation business, which provides vehicle-road collaboration solutions, is not developing as expected. In January this year, news was spread externally that ACE's full performance was hit with the lowest grade, "basically everyone didn't get any bonus, and ACE's revenue of several billion yuan last year was not up to standard overall." The above-mentioned people familiar with the matter said that

ChatGPT before the fire, heavy bet on self-driving Baidu, in order to support ACE, once the business involving intelligent transportation under ACG and to ACE, "ACE can sell things, the cloud can not sell." said the above-mentioned people familiar with the matter.

Right now, ACE, which is under IDG, is slow to make a big breakthrough, so Baidu has a new plan to integrate it into its cloud business. In the view of Wu Kewei, CEO of the vehicle-road collaboration startup, this is not a good thing, "so that two teams in one company don't have to do the same thing."

A month before Baidu shrunk its self-driving business, Ali made a major adjustment to its Dharma Institute's self-driving team of about 300 people in mid-May, in which the self-driving lab was merged into the Cainiao Group, along with staff optimization. There were rumors that the scale of the layoffs was as high as 70 percent, a ratio that Ali promptly denied.

Baidu, Ali outside, other technology majors in the field of autonomous driving is also gradually losing the will to explore: in January this year, the United States Mission unmanned vehicle department rumored layoff plans, the outflow of a WeChat screenshot shows that it is suspected that the United States Mission is located in Beijing Shunyi unmanned vehicle department for layoffs, the authenticity of this news has not been officially confirmed; and Ali with the same in 2018 around the field of autonomous driving Tencent, although The company has not been involved in the layoffs, but has long been invisible from the public eye in recent years, and has almost never revealed any relevant developments to the outside world.

Radical industry investor Jiang Yi even directly defined autonomous driving as a pseudo proposition. "It has prerequisites, that is, all people within a traffic environment, have to use autonomous driving to work. From this basic point of view, autonomous driving can only be driven forward by the rule makers of public utilities, and it is simply unrealistic to rely on the power of one company alone."

ChatGPT detonated the new wind of AI big model, when Nvidia founder Huang Renxun shouted that "AI's iPhone moment" is coming, all products are worth redoing with big model consensus, soon reached within the major technology manufacturers.

Even Musk, who has been preaching self-driving, has recently stated that the impact of general artificial intelligence is much greater than self-driving.

The new productivity changes brought about by the big AI models have likewise stirred the ambitions of the domestic tech moguls. Zhang Yong, who made his first public appearance after stepping down as Ali's CEO, shouted to the public, "I believe more than ever that the development of core technologies such as cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence will bring huge changes to society with great strategic significance, which is an important reason for my decision to devote myself to the Ali Cloud Intelligence Group."

Robin Li has also continued to externally proclaim the new blueprint of the big model reshaping the digital world.

Compared to the sci-fi-like autonomous driving, in Jiang Yi's opinion, "the concept of big model is a bit like the concept of whether there are aliens in the universe, and the former is expected to be realized with great probability."

It's not just the tech majors that are involved in the AI big model windfall. According to the data of "China AI Big Model Map Research Report", as of May 28, at least 79 basic big models above the scale of 1 billion domestic parameters have been released.

This fast-hyped battle for big models has begun to show the first signs of an approaching bubble. However, in the view of Qiji Chuangtan CEO Lu Qi, the current AI big model era is still in the early stage, and "after high growth, the bubble burst will be an inevitable phenomenon."

01

The tech majors, which are moving from expansion to contraction, are having trouble juggling multiple windfalls and investing a steady stream of R&D funds as they once did.

From 2022 onwards, cost reduction and efficiency gains will be a common choice for the major technology companies, with shrinking or shutting down loss-making businesses bearing the brunt.

Under the strategic guidance of Ma Huateng's "many businesses should be cut, don't stay", Tencent has cut more than 10 long-term loss-making products with low strategic value in the past year, including Watchpoint App, e-commerce platform Xiaoguo Pianping, digital collectibles collection platform Phantom Core, Tencent Wi-Fi Manager, Tencent Map PC version, Sogou Search App, etc.

Half a month after Ma Huateng's speech, Robin Li also said in an open letter that the future development of business "can not only look at revenue, to look at profits, but also to look at the input-output ratio".

Compared with the management costs and efforts paid by the company, non-core business spread too much, is being seen as a not cost-effective business. When the new AI big model wind comes, once the core business of self-driving also had to stand aside.

Moreover, general AI is even a game that may burn more money than autopilot. In the face of the same need for heavy investment, the same need to adhere to the long-termism of autonomous driving and big models, technology makers and then want to fish and bear paw both, obviously a less realistic thing.

Open AI, which is in full swing, has burned up more than $1 billion in training costs during its eight years of existence, and is still in a high loss state that requires blood transfusion from the giant Microsoft.

With the increase in the number of users, OpenAI's losses have also risen. According to media reports, OpenAI's losses will double to about $540 million in 2022. In order to develop sufficiently advanced general-purpose AI while keeping the company afloat, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said OpenAI may need to try to raise as much as $100 billion in the next few years.

Another point worth noting is that, despite the same commercialization challenges, the effect of AI big models on big tech companies is undoubtedly more direct and considerable compared to autonomous driving. As Jiang Yi said, the probability of achieving a big model is much greater than that of autonomous driving.

02

The troubled self-driving industry is also losing its appeal to the tech majors.

Around 2015, almost all the world's major technology companies released plans for autonomous driving, with declarations that "humanity will soon enter the era of fully autonomous driving". Google has Waymo, Baidu has Apollo, Amazon, Ali, Jingdong and Meituan have their eyes on unmanned delivery vehicles, and Uber, Lyft, Drip and other online car companies are looking at the unlimited future brought by Robotaxi (self-driving cabs).

By 2018, global technology majors have even reached a new consensus in the field of autonomous driving, that is, to skip the L2/L3 stage and directly develop L4 and above higher-order autonomous driving capabilities without drivers.

But the harsh reality soon made the tech majors recognize the difficulty of landing autonomous driving.

Waymo, once the global leader in autonomous driving, suffered a plunge in valuation due to delays in commercialization that did not meet expectations.

In 2018, Morgan Stanley valued Waymo at $175 billion, making it the third-largest unlisted company in the world after BytePulse and Space X. By 2020, after Waymo launched a new round of $2.25 billion in funding, Waymo's valuation at this time was only $30 billion, a plunge of more than 80%.

Waymo's former CEO John Krafcik confessed in an interview with the Financial Times, "Self-driving cars are just too abrasive ...... this guy is harder than putting a rocket into orbit, because we have to keep repeating tests in terms of safety to get peace of mind. "

In Waymo valuation plummeted at the same time, foreign online car giants Uber, Lyft, has sold the self-driving team; Amazon was shut down in October last year the size of about 400 people Scout unmanned delivery vehicle project.

"Once on the open road, involving a series of issues such as the complexity of the right-of-way, domestic self-driving companies often fall into the 'scale trap', the larger the scale, the more investment, resulting in higher losses." A new energy vehicle enterprises autonomous driving business leader told Box Lunch Finance, Baidu adjust ACE, Ali autonomous driving business before and after the two principals choose not to go on the road in the direction of clean robot start-ups, the reasons behind which are inseparable from the "road problems.

Entering 2023, the winter in the driverless field is still spreading globally: Embark, a self-driving truck company with a market value of $5 billion, announced the end of operations and fired most of its employees; Locomation, a self-driving truck, announced layoffs of nearly 70 percent, and its products were delayed in commercial operations; Nuro, an unmanned delivery company valued at $8.6 billion, announced massive layoffs and called off plans for mass production and commercial landing of unmanned vehicles.

In May, Tucson Future, known as the "No. 1 stock in autonomous driving," officially said it was "retaining cash and maintaining its business" with a new round of layoffs, dropping its U.S. company headcount from 550 to 220. The layoffs come shortly after Tucson Future received a delisting warning from Nasdaq for failing to file its 2022 annual report.

Compared to a market cap of $12 billion at its peak, Tucson Future is now down to just over $500 million.

The latest self-driving trucking company to head into bankruptcy is the domestic Prime Smart Truck. The startup, which was branched out from Pony Smart, was forced into a liquidation and write-off process after only 19 months of operation.

03

The big AI model has become a shot in the arm for tech majors to get out of the shadow of autopilot.

Under the consensus that all applications are worth redoing with big models, Baidu released Wenxin Yiyin and Wenxin Qianfan big model service platform; Ali released Tongyi Qianqiu and Qianqiu industry big model platform; Tencent launched industry big model solutions, hoping to build a selective store in the era of big models; Byte also followed by Volcano Ark, eyeing to "sell shovels The business of "selling shovels".

The other side of the excitement of the tech majors is the obstruction of AI big models in the commercialization process.

Despite having more than 800 million monthly active users, OpenAI has still failed to explore a commercialization path of scale on the C side, and is still trapped in the trap of losing more and more money the larger the scale is.

In order to explore a new commercialization path, according to the media, OpenAI is planning to launch a large model app store similar to App Store, allowing customers to customize large models on the shelves.

Before OpenAI explored the industry big model, domestic technology companies have long moved their competitive focus to this area, but the new challenge is that it is not easy to find a suitable scenario for industry big model to be landed and promoted on a large scale.

OpenAI CEO Alterman has said in an interview, "There is no product-market fit in ChatGPT's plug-in application."

It is because of the scarcity of scenarios, recently Zhu Xiaohu, the general manager of GSR Ventures, and Fu Sheng, the CEO of Cheetah Mobile, started a debate between themselves on "how big is the value of big model entrepreneurship" and "how many opportunities are there for big model entrepreneurship".

Because model, computing power and data, the three pillars to support the operation of large models are concentrated in large factories, Zhu Xiaohu believes that the large generic model is no longer an opportunity for startups, and the moat of making applications directly on the large model is too low.

More and more people in the investment circle are cautious about the AI big model windfall, and Wei Zhe, chairman of Jiayou Capital, even said that the current round of the "100 model war", no more than 2 domestic final winners.

In Lu Qi's view, the current AI big model era is still in the early stages, after the rapid growth, the bubble burst will be inevitable phenomenon. "However, after the bubble bursts, a new dawn will come. At that time, a new generation of more powerful companies will rise from the broken bubble and occupy the industrial high ground."

Now, it's up to which tech powerhouse can hold on until the moment the dawn really arrives.

Baidu, the tech powerhouse with the strongest presence on autonomous driving, is also starting to shrink its business.

According to Time Finance, Baidu has recently adjusted the organizational structure of Intelligent Driving Group (IDG), and its Intelligent Transportation Division (ACE) has been subsumed into Intelligent Cloud Group (ACG). After the adjustment, IDG's business segments have shrunk from the original three segments of autonomous driving, intelligent vehicles and intelligent transportation to only the first two.

An informed source close to Baidu Cloud confirmed the authenticity of the above adjustment to Box Lunch Finance, and said that all the existing 1,000-plus people of ACE will be merged into ACG.

The main reason for this adjustment is that the intelligent transportation business, which provides vehicle-road collaboration solutions, is not developing as expected. In January this year, news was spread externally that ACE's full performance was hit with the lowest grade, "basically everyone didn't get any bonus, and ACE's revenue of several billion yuan last year was not up to standard overall." The above-mentioned people familiar with the matter said that

ChatGPT before the fire, heavy bet on self-driving Baidu, in order to support ACE, once the business involving intelligent transportation under ACG and to ACE, "ACE can sell things, the cloud can not sell." said the above-mentioned people familiar with the matter.

Right now, ACE, which is under IDG, is slow to make a big breakthrough, so Baidu has a new plan to integrate it into its cloud business. In the view of Wu Kewei, CEO of the vehicle-road collaboration startup, this is not a good thing, "so that two teams in one company don't have to do the same thing."

A month before Baidu shrunk its self-driving business, Ali made a major adjustment to its Dharma Institute's self-driving team of about 300 people in mid-May, in which the self-driving lab was merged into the Cainiao Group, along with staff optimization. There were rumors that the scale of the layoffs was as high as 70 percent, a ratio that Ali promptly denied.

Baidu, Ali outside, other technology majors in the field of autonomous driving is also gradually losing the will to explore: in January this year, the United States Mission unmanned vehicle department rumored layoff plans, the outflow of a WeChat screenshot shows that it is suspected that the United States Mission is located in Beijing Shunyi unmanned vehicle department for layoffs, the authenticity of this news has not been officially confirmed; and Ali with the same in 2018 around the field of autonomous driving Tencent, although The company has not been involved in the layoffs, but has long been invisible from the public eye in recent years, and has almost never revealed any relevant developments to the outside world.

Radical industry investor Jiang Yi even directly defined autonomous driving as a pseudo proposition. "It has prerequisites, that is, all people within a traffic environment, have to use autonomous driving to work. From this basic point of view, autonomous driving can only be driven forward by the rule makers of public utilities, and it is simply unrealistic to rely on the power of one company alone."

ChatGPT detonated the new wind of AI big model, when Nvidia founder Huang Renxun shouted that "AI's iPhone moment" is coming, all products are worth redoing with big model consensus, soon reached within the major technology manufacturers.

Even Musk, who has been preaching self-driving, has recently stated that the impact of general artificial intelligence is much greater than self-driving.

The new productivity changes brought about by the big AI models have likewise stirred the ambitions of the domestic tech moguls. Zhang Yong, who made his first public appearance after stepping down as Ali's CEO, shouted to the public, "I believe more than ever that the development of core technologies such as cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence will bring huge changes to society with great strategic significance, which is an important reason for my decision to devote myself to the Ali Cloud Intelligence Group."

Robin Li has also continued to externally proclaim the new blueprint of the big model reshaping the digital world.

Compared to the sci-fi-like autonomous driving, in Jiang Yi's opinion, "the concept of big model is a bit like the concept of whether there are aliens in the universe, and the former is expected to be realized with great probability."

It's not just the tech majors that are involved in the AI big model windfall. According to the data of "China AI Big Model Map Research Report", as of May 28, at least 79 basic big models above the scale of 1 billion domestic parameters have been released.

This fast-hyped battle for big models has begun to show the first signs of an approaching bubble. However, in the view of Qiji Chuangtan CEO Lu Qi, the current AI big model era is still in the early stage, and "after high growth, the bubble burst will be an inevitable phenomenon."

01

The tech majors, which are moving from expansion to contraction, are having trouble juggling multiple windfalls and investing a steady stream of R&D funds as they once did.

From 2022 onwards, cost reduction and efficiency gains will be a common choice for the major technology companies, with shrinking or shutting down loss-making businesses bearing the brunt.

Under the strategic guidance of Ma Huateng's "many businesses should be cut, don't stay", Tencent has cut more than 10 long-term loss-making products with low strategic value in the past year, including Watchpoint App, e-commerce platform Xiaoguo Pianping, digital collectibles collection platform Phantom Core, Tencent Wi-Fi Manager, Tencent Map PC version, Sogou Search App, etc.

Half a month after Ma Huateng's speech, Robin Li also said in an open letter that the future development of business "can not only look at revenue, to look at profits, but also to look at the input-output ratio".

Compared with the management costs and efforts paid by the company, non-core business spread too much, is being seen as a not cost-effective business. When the new AI big model wind comes, once the core business of self-driving also had to stand aside.

Moreover, general AI is even a game that may burn more money than autopilot. In the face of the same need for heavy investment, the same need to adhere to the long-termism of autonomous driving and big models, technology makers and then want to fish and bear paw both, obviously a less realistic thing.

Open AI, which is in full swing, has burned up more than $1 billion in training costs during its eight years of existence, and is still in a high loss state that requires blood transfusion from the giant Microsoft.

With the increase in the number of users, OpenAI's losses have also risen. According to media reports, OpenAI's losses will double to about $540 million in 2022. In order to develop sufficiently advanced general-purpose AI while keeping the company afloat, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said OpenAI may need to try to raise as much as $100 billion in the next few years.

Another point worth noting is that, despite the same commercialization challenges, the effect of AI big models on big tech companies is undoubtedly more direct and considerable compared to autonomous driving. As Jiang Yi said, the probability of achieving a big model is much greater than that of autonomous driving.

02

The troubled self-driving industry is also losing its appeal to the tech majors.

Around 2015, almost all the world's major technology companies released plans for autonomous driving, with declarations that "humanity will soon enter the era of fully autonomous driving". Google has Waymo, Baidu has Apollo, Amazon, Ali, Jingdong and Meituan have their eyes on unmanned delivery vehicles, and Uber, Lyft, Drip and other online car companies are looking at the unlimited future brought by Robotaxi (self-driving cabs).

By 2018, global technology majors have even reached a new consensus in the field of autonomous driving, that is, to skip the L2/L3 stage and directly develop L4 and above higher-order autonomous driving capabilities without drivers.

But the harsh reality soon made the tech majors recognize the difficulty of landing autonomous driving.

Waymo, once the global leader in autonomous driving, suffered a plunge in valuation due to delays in commercialization that did not meet expectations.

In 2018, Morgan Stanley valued Waymo at $175 billion, making it the third-largest unlisted company in the world after BytePulse and Space X. By 2020, after Waymo launched a new round of $2.25 billion in funding, Waymo's valuation at this time was only $30 billion, a plunge of more than 80%.

Waymo's former CEO John Krafcik confessed in an interview with the Financial Times, "Self-driving cars are just too abrasive ...... this guy is harder than putting a rocket into orbit, because we have to keep repeating tests in terms of safety to get peace of mind. "

In Waymo valuation plummeted at the same time, foreign online car giants Uber, Lyft, has sold the self-driving team; Amazon was shut down in October last year the size of about 400 people Scout unmanned delivery vehicle project.

"Once on the open road, involving a series of issues such as the complexity of the right-of-way, domestic self-driving companies often fall into the 'scale trap', the larger the scale, the more investment, resulting in higher losses." A new energy vehicle enterprises autonomous driving business leader told Box Lunch Finance, Baidu adjust ACE, Ali autonomous driving business before and after the two principals choose not to go on the road in the direction of clean robot start-ups, the reasons behind which are inseparable from the "road problems.

Entering 2023, the winter in the driverless field is still spreading globally: Embark, a self-driving truck company with a market value of $5 billion, announced the end of operations and fired most of its employees; Locomation, a self-driving truck, announced layoffs of nearly 70 percent, and its products were delayed in commercial operations; Nuro, an unmanned delivery company valued at $8.6 billion, announced massive layoffs and called off plans for mass production and commercial landing of unmanned vehicles.

In May, Tucson Future, known as the "No. 1 stock in autonomous driving," officially said it was "retaining cash and maintaining its business" with a new round of layoffs, dropping its U.S. company headcount from 550 to 220. The layoffs come shortly after Tucson Future received a delisting warning from Nasdaq for failing to file its 2022 annual report.

Compared to a market cap of $12 billion at its peak, Tucson Future is now down to just over $500 million.

The latest self-driving trucking company to head into bankruptcy is the domestic Prime Smart Truck. The startup, which was branched out from Pony Smart, was forced into a liquidation and write-off process after only 19 months of operation.

03

The big AI model has become a shot in the arm for tech majors to get out of the shadow of autopilot.

Under the consensus that all applications are worth redoing with big models, Baidu released Wenxin Yiyin and Wenxin Qianfan big model service platform; Ali released Tongyi Qianqiu and Qianqiu industry big model platform; Tencent launched industry big model solutions, hoping to build a selective store in the era of big models; Byte also followed by Volcano Ark, eyeing to "sell shovels The business of "selling shovels".

The other side of the excitement of the tech majors is the obstruction of AI big models in the commercialization process.

Despite having more than 800 million monthly active users, OpenAI has still failed to explore a commercialization path of scale on the C side, and is still trapped in the trap of losing more and more money the larger the scale is.

In order to explore a new commercialization path, according to the media, OpenAI is planning to launch a large model app store similar to App Store, allowing customers to customize large models on the shelves.

Before OpenAI explored the industry big model, domestic technology companies have long moved their competitive focus to this area, but the new challenge is that it is not easy to find a suitable scenario for industry big model to be landed and promoted on a large scale.

OpenAI CEO Alterman has said in an interview, "There is no product-market fit in ChatGPT's plug-in application."

It is because of the scarcity of scenarios, recently Zhu Xiaohu, the general manager of GSR Ventures, and Fu Sheng, the CEO of Cheetah Mobile, started a debate between themselves on "how big is the value of big model entrepreneurship" and "how many opportunities are there for big model entrepreneurship".

Because model, computing power and data, the three pillars to support the operation of large models are concentrated in large factories, Zhu Xiaohu believes that the large generic model is no longer an opportunity for startups, and the moat of making applications directly on the large model is too low.

More and more people in the investment circle are cautious about the AI big model windfall, and Wei Zhe, chairman of Jiayou Capital, even said that the current round of the "100 model war", no more than 2 domestic final winners.

In Lu Qi's view, the current AI big model era is still in the early stages, after the rapid growth, the bubble burst will be inevitable phenomenon. "However, after the bubble bursts, a new dawn will come. At that time, a new generation of more powerful companies will rise from the broken bubble and occupy the industrial high ground."

Now, it's up to which tech powerhouse can hold on until the moment the dawn really arrives.