Baidu's CFO on How It Became a Full-Stack AI Player

Huo discussed hardware strategy and capital allocation candidly: Baidu has filed a confidential Hong Kong application to spin off its chip assets, aiming to unlock value and let the chip business operate as a neutral ecosystem vendor. He framed capital allocation as an "impossible triangle" — driving ambitious AI investment while maintaining returns and cash discipline — and said payback for projects can be 20–40 months, so pacing matters. On autonomous mobility he described Apollo Go as already delivering ~350k weekly trips across 27 cities, partnering with platforms like Uber, Lyft and Grab, and contrasted that with Waymo's roughly 500k/week example; he argued robotaxi economics must fall from roughly $1–$2.5/mile today toward ~$0.6–$0.8/mile to become a mass substitute for car ownership. Finally, Huo treated alignment and safety as engineering problems (data quality, post‑training, robustness), stressed an active open‑source/academic ecosystem, and framed China's policy and industrial support as a constructive environment rather than a constraint. Hosts pressed on governance and sector competition (including labor and talent), but Huo repeatedly returned to operational metrics, product monetization via agents, and pragmatic capital discipline as Baidu's route to being a full‑stack AI player.