Robin Li (Li Yanhong)
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Last reviewed
Jun 8, 2026
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Robin Li (Chinese: Li Yanhong; born November 17, 1968) is a Chinese computer scientist and internet entrepreneur who co-founded Baidu, the company that operates China's dominant search engine, and serves as its chairman and chief executive officer. [1][2] Before founding Baidu in 2000, Li created RankDex, an early technique for ranking web pages by analyzing the number and quality of the hyperlinks pointing to them. That hyperlink-analysis approach predated and was later referenced by the PageRank patent behind Google search. [1][3] Under Li's leadership Baidu became one of China's largest internet companies and, from the mid-2010s onward, reoriented itself around artificial intelligence, producing the ERNIE family of large language models, the ERNIE Bot chatbot, and the Apollo autonomous-driving program. [1][2]
Widely regarded as one of China's most influential technology figures, Li was an early and persistent advocate of artificial intelligence, directing Baidu toward AI research years before it became an industry-wide priority. [4] Forbes estimated his net worth at about 5.5 billion US dollars in May 2025, derived largely from a stake of roughly one-fifth in Baidu. [1] He was named to Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2010 and, in 2023, to the magazine's inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. [1][4]
Li was born on November 17, 1968, in Yangquan, a coal-mining city in Shanxi province in northern China. [1] He developed an early interest in computers and studied information management at Peking University, one of China's most selective universities, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1991. [1]
Seeking advanced training in computing, Li moved to the United States for graduate study and earned a Master of Science in computer science from the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York, in 1994. [1] He left the university's doctoral program to take a position in industry, beginning a career in search and information retrieval that would shape the rest of his professional life. [1]
From 1994 to 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, while at IDD, he developed RankDex, a system that scored and ranked web pages according to the hyperlinks directed at them rather than only the text they contained. [1] Li filed a United States patent for the method, "Hypertext Document Retrieval System and Method," on February 5, 1997; it was granted on July 6, 1999, under the inventor name Yanhong Li. [3] The patent for PageRank, the link-analysis algorithm filed by Google co-founder Larry Page in 1998, cites Li's earlier work. [1][3]
In July 1997 Li joined Infoseek, a pioneering internet search company, as a staff engineer. [1] There he contributed to search technology including an image-search feature used by the Go.com portal, remaining until December 1999. [1] His years in the United States gave him both technical expertise in search ranking and a close view of the commercial potential of the emerging web, which he resolved to pursue in China. [4]
Li returned to China and, in January 2000, co-founded Baidu in Beijing's Haidian district with Eric Xu (Xu Yong), a friend and fellow returnee from the United States. [1] The two raised an initial 1.2 million US dollars from the venture firms Integrity Partners and Peninsula Capital, followed by a 10 million US dollar round later that year from investors including IDG Technology Venture and Draper Fisher Jurvetson. [1] The company's name derives from a classical Chinese poem and evokes a persistent, repeated search. [1]
Baidu initially supplied search technology to other Chinese web portals before launching its own consumer search site, baidu.com, and building it into the most heavily used search engine in China, with a market share above 80 percent of queries for much of the following two decades. [1] On August 5, 2005, Baidu listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker BIDU; its shares surged more than 350 percent on the first trading day, one of the most dramatic debuts by a foreign company on the exchange, and the stock joined the Nasdaq-100 index in 2007. [1] Baidu became known, alongside Alibaba and Tencent, as one of the "BAT" trio that dominated China's internet, and Li also served as chairman of the company's video-streaming affiliate iQIYI. [1] Li has remained Baidu's chairman and chief executive officer throughout its history, holding a controlling share of the voting power through a dual-class share structure. [1][2]
Li committed Baidu to an "AI-first" strategy well before generative AI reached the mainstream, opening a dedicated deep-learning research institute in 2013. [1] In 2014 he recruited the computer scientist Andrew Ng as chief scientist to lead Baidu Research, including a Silicon Valley AI Lab; Ng remained until 2017. [7] Baidu also built a full technology stack for AI that Li often describes in four layers: the PaddlePaddle open-source deep-learning framework, in-house Kunlun AI chips, foundation models, and applications. [5]
Baidu introduced its ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration) pretraining framework in 2019 and developed it into a family of increasingly capable foundation models. [5] On March 16, 2023, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT, Baidu unveiled ERNIE Bot (Chinese: Wenxin Yiyan), one of the first major Chinese answers to ChatGPT, and opened it to the public on August 31, 2023, after receiving Chinese regulatory approval. [4][8] The chatbot reported more than 200 million users within months. [4]
Baidu accelerated its model releases as competition intensified, particularly after the Chinese startup DeepSeek released low-cost open models in early 2025. On March 16, 2025, Baidu launched the multimodal model ERNIE 4.5 and a reasoning model, ERNIE X1, and made ERNIE Bot free to users from April 1, 2025; the company said ERNIE 4.5 matched or exceeded OpenAI's GPT-4.5 on several benchmarks at a small fraction of the cost. [6] At its Baidu World conference on November 13, 2025, the company unveiled ERNIE 5.0, a natively omni-modal model that jointly processes text, images, audio, and video with up to 2.4 trillion parameters, offered through ERNIE Bot and the Qianfan platform on Baidu AI Cloud. [5]
| Model or system | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ERNIE framework | 2019 | Knowledge-enhanced pretraining model family |
| ERNIE Bot (Wenxin Yiyan) | March 2023 | Chatbot; public release August 31, 2023 |
| ERNIE 4.0 | October 2023 | Upgraded foundation model |
| ERNIE 4.5 and ERNIE X1 | March 2025 | Multimodal model plus a reasoning model; both made free |
| ERNIE 5.0 | November 2025 | Natively omni-modal, up to 2.4 trillion parameters |
Li has also championed autonomous driving. Baidu launched the Apollo open platform in 2017 and built it into the Apollo Go robotaxi service (Chinese: Luobo Kuaipao), one of the world's largest commercial autonomous-driving operations. By late 2025 Baidu said Apollo Go operated in 22 cities, including Wuhan, Beijing, Shanghai, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi, had provided more than 17 million rides, and had accumulated over 240 million kilometers of driving, of which more than 140 million were fully driverless. [9] The service reached unit break-even in its largest market, Wuhan, although its rapid expansion also drew safety scrutiny after reports of vehicles stopping in traffic. [9][13]
Li has used his prominence to argue for a particular view of the industry. In November 2023 he called the repeated development of competing foundation models "an enormous waste of social resources" and urged developers to focus instead on AI-native applications "at a scale of millions." [10] He has rejected the idea that the boom is a speculative bubble, and at the World Governments Summit in Dubai in February 2025 he argued that the inference cost of large language models could fall by more than 90 percent each year, predicting exponential growth in AI applications. [11][12]
Li has received numerous honors recognizing his role in Chinese technology and the global AI industry.
| Year | Honor |
|---|---|
| 2005 | CCTV China Economic Person of the Year |
| 2010 | Time 100 most influential people in the world [1] |
| 2014 | Co-chair, United Nations Independent Expert Advisory Group on a Data Revolution for Sustainable Development [1] |
| 2023 | Time 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence (inaugural list) [4] |
His 2014 appointment to co-chair the United Nations Secretary-General's expert group on data for sustainable development placed him among a small number of business leaders advising the body on the global use of data. [1] In Chinese and international media Li is frequently cited as a symbol of the country's technology ambitions and its drive to diffuse artificial intelligence throughout the economy. [4]