Chapter 347: Never Expected This
Not all products need a press conference.
Sometimes, stepping on others to rise is also a way.
Baidu’s Wenxin Yiyan press conference was held in the afternoon, and at exactly eight o’clock in the evening, Lin Ran synchronized a short video on his personal social platform, only a short eight seconds long:
“I made an artificial intelligence called Deep Red. Those who are interested can go try it out.
Pony, what do you think?”
Compared to Robin’s formality during the press conference, Lin Ran’s attire was very casual, and the entire video even highlighted a sense of perfunctoriness.
The lens shifted away from Lin Ran’s face, and Pony appeared in the lens. He was also in casual wear, but with a beaming smile, giving a thumbs up with both hands, saying: “I think it’s fantastic.”
The lens returned to Lin Ran, and Lin Ran said to the lens: “Hope everyone has fun with it.”
After this video, all official accounts in the Tencent ecosystem began to push the Deep Red website.
“Deep Red, beyond your imagination.”
The caption was just these short seven words.
“Brother Ran’s promotion is too simplistic.” Xu Xian was in the library, originally planning to carefully read two of the latest hot papers on PDEs, deep reading! Draft paper and pen were prepared, and the mobile phone was set to silent mode, just to avoid disturbances.
But starting from eight o’clock, the mobile phone screen kept lighting up, and the WeChat icon kept appearing on the phone lock screen interface, never stopping.
Xu Xian endured it for five minutes but really couldn’t hold back.
“Holy crap, this is blatantly slapping Baidu in the face!”
“Pony is so naughty.JPG”
“Deep Red is too awesome. This level of intelligence feels even higher than the GPT I use.”
“Yeah, and it’s not GPT-3, it’s even more impressive than the GPT-4 that OpenAI released a couple of days ago.”
“Its responses in the Chinese language field are undoubtedly superior, especially for text replies involving literary creation, which are particularly outstanding, but the response quality in the English field is no less than GPT-4.”
“It’s over, Baidu is done. Robin said in an interview this afternoon that there is currently no company in the world that can catch up to OpenAI in the artificial intelligence field, and tonight Tencent comes out with Deep Red. If this isn’t a slap in the face, what is?”
“The slap in the face is secondary; the impact on Baidu’s stock price is the most fatal.”
“What about God Xu? Why isn’t God Xu saying something? Didn’t he get the news first?”
Then in various group chats, they kept @-ing Xu Xian.
Xu Xian couldn’t hold back, picked up his mobile phone, and only then realized that Brother Ran’s artificial intelligence had been released.
“Deep Red? This timing is too deliberate. This is stepping hard on Baidu and Robin to rise.” Xu Xian thought to himself.
He couldn’t sit still anymore and packed his bag to return to the dorm.
When he got back to the dorm, he found his roommate Li Yiqing already sitting at the desk, with the Deep Red interface on the screen of the notebook computer in front of him, which he had seen on Weibo.
The simple black-red colored interface really made it hard to associate with a generative artificial intelligence interface; it was more like a mech operation interface.
“Brother Qing, how is it?” Xu Xian asked.
Li Yiqing pointed: “Here, see for yourself.”
Xu Xian leaned to the screen, glanced at it, and said, “Holy crap! So professional?”
Li Yiqing’s question was very much in his style.
“If I want to research applied mathematics in the future, deeply learn knowledge in this direction, and engage in theoretical research in this field, and I am currently an undergraduate student in the mathematics department, please help me plan a learning path.”
This was his question, and Deep Red’s response included learning content, timeline, goals for each stage, recommended textbooks, self-study courses from MIT OCW, YouTube, and Coursera, how to practice, how to get started, and so on.
Extremely comprehensive and complete.
“From the perspective of a PhD in applied mathematics who is about to graduate, this response has no issues at all. Even I myself couldn’t give such a comprehensive answer.
It even suggests joining communities like Mathoverflow and Reddit r/math, and how to adjust the content you need to learn based on your interests and strengths, and when to choose a direction.
To me, the only shortcoming is that it recommends too many books, and all are English books, like ‘Introduction to Applied Mathematics’, ‘X and the City: Modeling Aspects of Urban Life’, and such.
First, it’s difficult for an undergraduate student to understand pure English applied mathematics books. Second, it just gives suggestions, but if you really follow its suggestions, you’ll spend a lot of time gnawing through these books, and only after finishing will you know if they’re good or suitable for you.
This is me nitpicking to find these issues.
Otherwise, it’s almost perfect.”
Unlike other users who focus more on whether the AI’s poems are good or if the articles it writes are fluent when using artificial intelligence, Li Yiqing focuses more on practical applications.
After chattering on, Li Yiqing concluded: “In my view, Deep Red is more usable than GPT, with a higher level of manifested intelligence, of course not true intelligence, but the intelligence it demonstrates.
The information it integrates is more complete, and the answers it gives to problems are more in line with human thinking.
It’s really too unbelievable.
Either of two possibilities: one is that Ran Shen has long invested research in this direction, and this is the result of accumulation; the second is that they really achieved surpassing GPT in just two months.
Whichever it is, it’s too impressive.”
Xu Xian said: “Whichever it is, I only know one thing: Baidu is done.
If this was made by a small company, Baidu might still cling on with its moat, but this is the product of cooperation between Brother Ran and Tencent.
With Tencent’s traffic and promotion ability, Baidu’s market share will be rapidly devoured.
Wenxin Yiyan is not only not the horn for them to turn the tables against the wind, but instead the death knell for them stepping into the grave.”
To put it this way, anyone who knows about Baidu’s shady operations can’t have a good impression of Baidu.
Under the collective bidding mode, they frantically advertised for Putian-affiliated hospitals and P2P companies; as long as you pay, the ad website could push aside the original search results.
It shows no social responsibility whatsoever.
Netizens’ disgust for Baidu isn’t something from just one or two days; it’s even a bit like this hatred stretches on endlessly.
This is also why, although Robin has no flaws at all in his personal image, resume, or private life, his reputation on the Simplified Chinese Internet is notoriously bad.
Some people drag down their companies themselves, like Li Bin and Ideal among Wei Xiaoli; these two founders spoke carelessly and dragged their companies down with them, making people hate the companies as well. Lei Jun is the type whose personal image propelled Xiaomi to soar, while Robin is a rare case where the person is dragged down by the company’s image.
After hearing this, Li Yiqing said: “This is great news! If Baidu goes under, I’ll definitely have a big drink to celebrate.”
Xu Xian added: “I’ll set off fireworks to celebrate!”
He then sat down at his computer, turned it on, entered the website, completed registration, and then started asking questions. The questions he asked were similar to Li Yiqing’s; Li Yiqing asked about applied mathematics, while he asked about partial differential equations.
“As a mathematics department undergraduate student, you likely already have some foundation, but learning PDE requires solid prerequisite knowledge.
These are the typical prerequisites for PDE courses, ensuring you can understand the analysis tools and methods in PDE. If any are missing, it’s
1. Calculus sequence: single-variable, multivariable calculus (including vector analysis, Green’s theorem, Stokes’ theorem), these are the core of integral and differential operations in partial differential equations.
2. Linear Algebra: matrices, vector spaces, eigenvalues, etc., PDE often involves linear operators.
3. Ordinary differential equations (ODE): Solution methods for first-order and second-order ODEs, such as separation of variables and integrating factor. Introduction to partial differential equations often extends from ODEs.
4. Basics of Fourier analysis: Fourier series and transforms, which are key tools for solving many linear partial differential equations (such as the heat equation and wave equation).
The entire answer was extremely comprehensive, and what shocked Xu Xian even more was, “Holy crap, Brother Qing, how does this even include preparations for applying to a master’s or PhD?”
It suggests that in the later stage of undergraduate studies, I find a professor to do a research project in the field of numerical analysis, target school can choose University of Minnesota, the school’s PDE research is active, and also prepare for the GRE mathematics subject test, highlighting PDE-related courses.
Holy crap, I saw that in your answer, it didn’t include any content on this aspect.
Li Yiqing leaned over to take a look, “Yeah, this level of intelligence is even higher; it even knows that mathematics research requires studying abroad, a local PhD is not valuable domestically, but the problem is, why doesn’t applied mathematics need it?”
A moment later Li Yiqing said: “Probably because its training database has more comprehensive answers about PDE, so the integrated answer it produces is more intelligent.”
Deep Red can shock ordinary users with its literary quality, and shock advanced intellectuals like Li Yiqing and Xu Xian on professional issues. Undoubtedly, once launched, Deep Red’s influence rapidly spreads.
Originally, netizens in China were still immersed in the disappointment from Baidu Wenxin Yiyan’s performance that afternoon; not only did Wenxin Yiyan lack any live demonstration, with only a pre-recorded video, but its performance was also very poor.
It does not reflect at all its advantage over search engines.
At eight o’clock in the evening, Deep Red gave them a big surprise.
This is just like a nuclear bomb, a nuclear bomb cast on the Chinese Internet.
At this time, if you open any group, whether WeChat Group or QQ group, they are all discussing Deep Red.
At 8:58 p.m., Deep Red’s official Weibo posted a celebratory poster:
“At 58 minutes, the number of registered users broke through 1 million!”
The poster is red, the text is black, the entire poster fits well with the Deep Red name, and the number of likes is rapidly increasing.
Netizens are also actively leaving comments below.
That evening when the US Stock Market opened, Baidu instantly plunged, even though senior analysts from America Bank and Citibank came out to endorse it, saying Wenxin Yiyan was very useful and far exceeded expectations, but your competitor completed the breakthrough from zero to one million in just one hour.
What’s more, no one in the capital market is optimistic that Baidu can win the head-on competition against Tencent. The helmsman of Tencent Artificial Intelligence is still Lin Ran, the man nicknamed the mad scientist on the external network.
It opened down 14 percentage points, the intraday decline further expanded to 23 percentage points, and by the close it slightly rebounded to 19 percentage points.
“Ran Shen is really too ruthless. Baidu still had a market capitalization of 44 billion before the market opened today, but by the close, it was only around 35.6 billion, losing nearly 10 billion US dollars in market capitalization in one day.
That’s too terrifying. An 8-second video is the press conference, with one million registered users in one hour. This isn’t an app. Deep Red currently only has a web version and hasn’t adapted for mobile yet.
This means that more than 1 million users have completed registration and usage by opening web pages on their computers.
It’s really too ferocious.
Pony is probably dying of laughter. Without any effort, it crushed Baidu. With the ability demonstrated by Deep Red, at most half a year, at most half a year time, Baidu’s search engine will fall to a market share similar to Bing’s.
This is not the most fatal; the most fatal is that Tencent acquired Sogou in 2020, fully acquiring Sogou. Sogou has always had search engine business. If Tencent uses Deep Red to empower Sogou.
Or relaunch a Deep Red search engine based on artificial intelligence, and merge Sogou into it.
It’s uncertain whether Baidu can guarantee the same status as Bing.
Wiped out nearly 10 billion US dollars of Baidu’s market capitalization in eight seconds.
Really, living in this era, we witness miracles every day.
Additionally, to say more, Robin said that Chinese technology companies and GPT are at least two years apart. I suggest that with your level, you should honestly bring Lu Qi back. In this AI campaign, it’s no wonder you can’t win with your cognition.” A sentiment recorded late at night by a certain big V on Douyin.
On that day, it wasn’t just Baidu that plummeted; all non-Tencent affiliated internet companies from China listed in America were falling.
Tencent’s Deep Red, as well as the significance behind it, is major negative news for all these companies.
On the other hand, companies like Google, META, and Apple also saw their market capitalization slightly decline due to the influence, while Tencent has business overseas after all.
Only Nvidia surged again.
After all, no matter how much everyone digs for gold mines, selling shovels is always a surefire profit.
New York, a prison built in the 18th century, where Nilanjan has been staying for over a year.
At the beginning, Commissioner Smith from the FBI kept coming to interrogate him, insisting on forcing him to say exactly how he assisted China in completing the Apollo Moon Landing.
What key role he played in it.
And hinting that as long as he handed over the key technical data, they could let him out.
The problem is, Nilanjan knows full well that he really didn’t get involved in this. He said on his mouth that he gave help, but approving a fake one counts as help?
He also wants to give technical data. America has landed on the moon, and India can share in the glory.
But he really can’t produce it.
Later, the interrogations gradually became once a week, then once a month, half a year.
Now it’s been a full half year since anyone other than prison staff has come to talk to him, no Commissioner Smith.
He is like forgotten in a corner of the Empire, calling to heaven gets no response, calling to earth gets no reply.
Nilanjan’s experience also serves as a reminder to many Indian-origin professors: never recruit China students just because they are good to use.
Over this year plus, the difficulty for China students applying for America PhDs has greatly increased, and this is one of the reasons.
This day, as usual, Nilanjan got up, thinking about how exactly he could leave this damn place.
Then two figures appeared at the door, one is Commissioner Smith, the other, this person he knows well, very familiar, often seen on social media: Zuckerberg.
“Professor Balasubramanian, congratulations, you have been bailed out. During the bail period, you are not allowed to leave New York. Mister Zuckerberg bailed you out,” Commissioner Smith said.
Nilanjan’s whole body was glowing, damn I can finally get out, his eyes welled up with tears, thinking: who would have thought, the one who saved me is actually Zuckerberg?
