On September 8th, Baidu founder Robin Li personally presented the company's "Baidu Highest Award" to a technology team, with the prize money reaching $1 million USD, equivalent to over 7 million RMB. This prestigious award was given to the "Heart Flow" team in recognition of their breakthrough achievements in AI multimodal technology.

The "Baidu Highest Award" was established in 2010 and represents the most valuable internal recognition within Baidu, now in its 15th edition. The award has stringent criteria that must be met: the project must have significant impact, results must far exceed expectations, and the team must not exceed 10 members. During the ceremony, Li emphasized that this award primarily encourages "small teams to accomplish big things."

This year's "Heart Flow" team won the award for pioneering "end-to-end multimodal content understanding and sequence generation" technology. The core of this technology lies in enabling AI to not only understand various forms of information such as images, text, and videos, but also to integrate this information like humans do to generate content. This capability will directly drive experience upgrades in Baidu's search, recommendation, and Q&A functions.

At the award ceremony, Li stated that the development of AI large models is approaching a critical breakthrough point. He said: "We will soon see various practical applications it brings, and this market is already very exciting." He also revealed that currently 65% of Baidu search results already incorporate generative content. This means that many of the answers users see are no longer simple webpage links, but content directly generated by AI - including text, image collections, videos, and even live streaming content. This approach has profoundly changed people's search habits.

Li described this reform as the most radical globally. He believes that this search method integrating AI-generated content represents the future direction of search engine development.

Beyond search, Baidu's other products are also comprehensively integrating AI technology. For instance, on Baidu's "Baikan" platform, nearly all content recommendations are AI-driven, and regardless of what users search for, they see multimedia results combining text-image layouts or short video combinations.

Over the past 15 years, Baidu's highest award has distributed nearly 400 million RMB in prize money. These awards have not only motivated technology teams but also propelled the company's overall AI innovation process. From speech recognition to deep learning platforms, and now to large models and multimodal technology, Baidu continues to integrate cutting-edge technology into products, attempting to gain an early advantage in the AI era.