Baidu CEO warns AI is just an inevitable bubble — 99% of AI companies are at risk of failing when the bubble bursts

Silicon Valley has had one too many episodes of companies transforming from rags to riches. Today, we see giants like Nvidia and OpenAI at the frontiers of Artificial Intelligence—with every single company now in full throttle to get their hands on a piece of the pie. Interestingly, Baidu CEO Robin Li, speaking at the Harvard Business Review’s Future of Business conference, predicts that AI is just another bubble, like the dot-com bubble. Ultimately, only 1% of companies will remain afloat in this cutthroat industry.

For reference, Nvidia’s market cap rose tenfold over just two years, going from a modest $300 Billion to an eyewatering $3.4 Trillion. Tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple are pouring billions upon billions of dollars into AI – even chipmakers such as AMD and Intel have dissected their server-grade offerings into chips reserved for low-precision computing like FP8, FP6, and FP4; the very resource that AI relies on. It is clear that AI is all the hype these days, and you don’t need us to tell you that.

Robin Li says increased accuracy is one of the largest improvements we’ve seen in Artificial Intelligence. “I think over the past 18 months, that problem has pretty much been solved—meaning when you talk to a chatbot, a frontier model-based chatbot, you can basically trust the answer,” the CEO added.

A train can only carry so many people; likewise, Robin says that AI is just an “inevitable bubble, ” similar to the dot-com bubble in the late 90s and the mobile internet market. Li goes as far as to say that this period of uncertainty is healthy and will cleanse the AI market from all the “fake innovations or products” that are unfit for consumer demand; “probably 1% of the companies will stand out and become huge and will create a lot of value, or will create tremendous value for the people, for society. And I think we are just going through this kind of process.”

The CEO reassures that it will take at least 10 to 30 years before Artificial Intelligence replaces human jobs. In any case, it should be evident that Robin Li has clear and straightforward objectives for Baidu and does not want to follow the path of other opportunistic players in the market.