Robin Li, the founder of Baidu, presented the "Baidu Highest Honor Award" to technical teams at an internal event on the evening of September 21, with both finalist teams each receiving a $1 million prize, bringing the total award payout for this year to $2 million, equivalent to over 13 million yuan.
"The Baidu Highest Honor Award is a very typical reflection of Baidu's technological faith," Li stated at the event. "Since the very first day Baidu was founded, we have believed in technology. Many of our technologies were only recognized and showed results because of ten or fifteen years of persistence. We excel at perseverance. We have patience, we have determination, and we have confidence. We recognize the value of technology, and that is the true competitiveness of Baidu."
The two technical teams that received this year's "Baidu Highest Honor Award" are positioned at opposite ends of Baidu's full-stack AI layout, which spans "chip-cloud-model-application." Among them, the Tianchi team independently developed Baidu's Tianchi super-node architecture, targeting trillion-parameter MoE large models. Meanwhile, the dodo team, by creating enterprise AI employees, has become a core carrier for organizational AI internalization and the best-practice platform for agents entering Baidu's actual work environment.
In Robin Li's view, for the technical teams receiving the Baidu Highest Honor Award, this is likely just the beginning of a long journey. He cited the example of the "Xiantong" team, a 2015 award recipient that worked on chips. "At the time, no one understood. The first decade or so was tough, and many outsiders questioned why we were making chips. But after persisting for over a decade, we now see rapid revenue growth, expanding profit margins, and growing recognition from the capital markets."
He also shared that the "Linghang" team, a 2021 award winner, focused on autonomous driving. Later, the order volume for Apollo Go soared, and today, Baidu's autonomous driving technology ranks in the world's absolute first tier. "It also went through a long journey, a journey of over ten years, to gradually reach this state."
"I hope everyone can work together, persist in our persistence, believe in our beliefs, and become the biggest beneficiaries of this era. Let us work together to create an era for technology believers, an era for every Baidu employee!" Li said.
Established in July 2010, the "Baidu Highest Honor Award" is Baidu's highest-level corporate prize, designed to encourage "small teams to achieve great things," with each winning team receiving a $1 million reward. Award selection must meet three criteria: the project must be of significant importance; results must far exceed expectations; and the team must be exceptionally small, with a maximum of ten members. To date, the "Baidu Highest Honor Award" has been held for 16 years, with numerous AI technologies, including speech recognition, deep learning platforms, and large models, having received the award, and total prize money accumulating to nearly 400 million yuan.
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