Robin Li

Overview

Robin Li (李彦宏, Li Yanhong) was born on 17 November 1968 in Yangquan, Shanxi. He is a co-founder and the chief executive of Baidu, and he is also chairman of the video platform iQIYI.^[1]

Education and early career

Li studied information management at Peking University. He then went to the United States, where he left a computer-science doctoral program at the University at Buffalo with a master's degree in 1994.^[1]

From 1994 to 1997 he worked at IDD Information Services, a division of Dow Jones. In 1996 there he created the RankDex site-scoring algorithm for search ranking. He was then a staff engineer at Infoseek from July 1997 to December 1999.^[1]

Major contributions

Before founding Baidu, Li created the RankDex ranking method in 1996.^[1] In March 2023 he presented ERNIE Bot at its launch in Beijing. He acknowledged that the product was not perfect, but said the market demanded it, so it was released.^[2]

At the launch of ERNIE 4.0 in October 2023, Li said the model was "not inferior in any aspect to GPT-4".^[3]

At Create 2025 he called MCP (Model Context Protocol) a "universal socket" for AI, and said that multimodality would become a standard feature of future foundation models.^[4]

Career

Li co-founded Baidu with Eric Xu in January 2000 and has been its chief executive since January 2004.^[1]

Influence

Time named him to its 2023 list of the 100 most influential people in AI. He served on the 12th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) from 2013 to 2018.^[1]