Robin Li
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Robin Li (Li Yanhong; born November 17, 1968) is a Chinese software engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded Baidu in January 2000 and has led it ever since as chairman and chief executive officer [1]. Before Baidu, Li invented RankDex, a hyperlink-analysis search algorithm he developed in 1996 and patented in the United States, work that predates and is cited by Larry Page's PageRank patent [2][3]. Under Li, Baidu became the dominant Chinese-language search engine, listed on NASDAQ in 2005 with one of the largest first-day gains since the dot-com era, and pivoted early to deep learning, hiring Andrew Ng as chief scientist in 2014 [4][6]. Li launched ERNIE Bot, the first ChatGPT-style chatbot from a major Chinese technology company, on March 16, 2023 [7]. Long one of the industry's most outspoken skeptics of open-source AI, he reversed position after the rise of DeepSeek and open-sourced the ERNIE 4.5 model family on June 30, 2025 [9][14][15]. He also oversees Apollo Go, one of the world's largest robotaxi operations [21].
Li was born on November 17, 1968, in Yangquan, a coal-mining city in Shanxi Province, the fourth of five children and the only boy; both of his parents were factory workers [1]. He studied information management at Peking University, earning a bachelor's degree, and moved to the United States in the fall of 1991 to begin doctoral study in computer science at the State University of New York at Buffalo [1]. He left the PhD program in 1994 with a master's degree to join industry [1].
From May 1994 to June 1997 Li worked at IDD Information Services, a New Jersey division of Dow Jones and Company, where he helped build software for the online edition of The Wall Street Journal and worked on algorithms for ranking search results [1]. In 1996 he created RankDex, a search system that scored web pages by analyzing the hyperlinks pointing to them and the anchor text of those links, applying the logic of academic citation analysis to the web [2][3]. He filed a US patent application, "Hypertext document retrieval system and method" (US 5,920,859), on February 5, 1997; it was granted on July 6, 1999 [2][3]. RankDex is widely recognized as the first search engine to use hyperlink analysis for ranking, and Larry Page's later PageRank patent for what became Google's core algorithm cites Li's work [2].
In July 1997 Li joined the Silicon Valley search company Infoseek as a staff engineer, where he remained until December 1999 and contributed to picture-search technology used by Go.com [1].
In January 2000 Li returned to China and founded Baidu with co-founder Eric Xu, a biochemist, working out of a hotel room overlooking Peking University with 1.2 million US dollars raised from the venture firms Integrity Partners and Peninsula Capital [5]. The company's name comes from a Song dynasty poem by Xin Qiji in which the narrator searches "hundreds of times" for his beloved in a festival crowd [5]. Baidu began as a search-technology supplier to Chinese portals before launching its own consumer search engine, and Li has served as chief executive since January 2004 [1].
Baidu listed on NASDAQ on August 5, 2005. Shares priced at 27 dollars closed their first day at 122.54 dollars, a gain of about 354 percent, the biggest first-day pop for any IPO in the US since the dot-com boom [4]. The stock joined the NASDAQ-100 index in 2007 [1]. Baidu held over 80 percent of the Chinese search market at its peak, a dominance reinforced when Google pulled its search service out of mainland China in 2010 [1][5].
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1996 | Develops the RankDex link-analysis algorithm at IDD [3] |
| 2000 | Co-founds Baidu with Eric Xu in Beijing [5] |
| 2005 | Baidu IPO on NASDAQ; shares rise 354 percent on day one [4] |
| 2013 | Baidu opens the Institute of Deep Learning [27] |
| 2014 | Hires Andrew Ng as chief scientist [6] |
| 2023 | Launches ERNIE Bot on March 16 [7] |
| 2025 | Open-sources the ERNIE 4.5 family (June 30); unveils ERNIE 5.0 (November 13) [15][17] |
| 2026 | Declares the shift from model competition to AI agents at Create 2026 [18] |
Li moved Baidu into deep learning unusually early for a large internet company. In January 2013 Baidu established its Institute of Deep Learning, one of the first corporate deep-learning labs in China, which Li said he hoped would become "a top-tier research institution like AT&T Bell Labs and Xerox PARC" [27]. In May 2014 he recruited Andrew Ng, the Stanford professor who had founded Google's deep-learning team, as Baidu's chief scientist, alongside a 300 million dollar, five-year commitment to a Silicon Valley research lab [6]. Ng departed in 2017 [29]. Baidu opened its Apollo autonomous-driving platform in 2017, the foundation of the later Apollo Go robotaxi service [5].
On March 16, 2023, Li personally unveiled ERNIE Bot, Baidu's answer to ChatGPT, built on the ERNIE family of knowledge-enhanced language models the company had been developing since 2019 [7][8]. The launch event drew criticism because Li presented pre-recorded demonstrations rather than a live system; Baidu's Hong Kong shares fell as much as 10 percent during the presentation and closed down 6.4 percent, erasing roughly 3 billion dollars of market value, though the stock rebounded 14 percent the next day after analysts who received access posted favorable first impressions [7].
The January 2025 emergence of DeepSeek's low-cost open-weight models upended Baidu's strategy. In February 2025 Baidu announced that ERNIE Bot would become free to all users on April 1, 2025, and that the next-generation ERNIE model would be open-sourced from June 30, 2025 [12][13]. Baidu released ERNIE 4.5 and the reasoning model ERNIE X1 in March 2025, pricing them aggressively against DeepSeek [26]. On June 30, 2025, it open-sourced the ERNIE 4.5 family, ten variants under the Apache 2.0 license ranging from a 0.3 billion parameter model to a mixture-of-experts system with 424 billion total and 47 billion active parameters [15][16]. At Baidu World on November 13, 2025, Li introduced ERNIE 5.0, a natively omni-modal foundation model that jointly handles text, images, audio, and video, telling the audience that internalizing AI "transforms intelligence from a cost into a source of productivity" [17].
Li has made Apollo Go a centerpiece of Baidu's AI commercialization. The service's mass rollout in Wuhan became a national talking point in the summer of 2024, prompting debate over taxi-driver livelihoods; Li responded that the roughly 400-vehicle Wuhan fleet was "just 1 percent of Wuhan's total taxi fleet" and that growth would take years [19][20]. By November 2025 Apollo Go had completed more than 17 million cumulative rides and operated in 22 cities, including Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and Baidu had struck partnerships to deploy robotaxis on Uber's network internationally and with Lyft to enter the United Kingdom and Germany in 2026, a deal Li called a significant milestone in Apollo Go's global expansion [21][22].
Li is the AI industry's most prominent advocate of an applications-first philosophy. In November 2023 he argued that China's rush to build foundation models was an "enormous waste of social resources," and at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July 2024 he warned that competition among more than 100 Chinese large language models had wasted significant resources, especially computing power, asking developers to focus on real-world applications instead [11][28]. He has repeatedly said that models alone create no value, telling TIME in late 2025: "Don't focus on models; focus on applications" [25]. He has also said Baidu is not trying to build a single AI super app, expecting value to spread across many applications [11].
His position on open versus closed models reversed sharply. In April 2024, in remarks reported from an internal memo, Li said open-source models "make little sense," that closed-source models had stronger capabilities, and that "being closed source allows us to make money, and only by making money can we attract computational resources and talent"; at Baidu's developer conference that month he predicted open-source models would fall further and further behind [9][10]. After DeepSeek's breakout, he conceded the point on Baidu's February 2025 earnings call: "One thing we learned from DeepSeek is that open sourcing the best models can greatly help adoption" [14]. CNBC described the June 2025 ERNIE open-sourcing as China's biggest public AI release since DeepSeek and a stark reversal of Li's earlier stance [26].
At Baidu's Create 2026 developer conference in Beijing on May 14, 2026, Li argued the industry had entered a new phase in which "what really made AI go viral was not the model, but the application," and predicted a "super individual" era in which the smallest productive unit becomes one person plus a fleet of AI agents [18].
Li appeared on the cover of TIME's Asia edition dated January 29, 2018, billed as "The Innovator," the first Chinese internet entrepreneur featured on the magazine's cover [23]. TIME named him to its inaugural TIME100 AI list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence in 2023, and interviewed him at Baidu World in November 2025 for its Person of the Year coverage of AI's leading figures [24][25]. Earlier honors include selection among China's "Top Ten Innovative Pioneers" in 2001 and CCTV's Chinese Economic Figures of the Year for 2005 [1]. Forbes estimated his net worth at about 5.5 billion US dollars as of May 2025; estimates vary with Baidu's share price [1]. Li is married to Ma Dongmin, who also works at Baidu, and has four children; the family lives in Beijing [1].