Robin Li (Li Yanhong), Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Baidu, built one of the world’s leading search engines before helping lay the groundwork for China’s broader push into artificial intelligence. Born in 1968 in Yangquan, Shanxi Province, Li earned a bachelor’s degree in information management from Peking University and a master’s degree in computer science from the State University of New York at Buffalo.
Li’s career began at IDD Information Services, a Dow Jones unit, where he helped build a real-time financial information system. He later worked as an engineer at Infoseek, an early search engine company, where in 1996 he developed RankDex — a hyperlink-based site-ranking algorithm that predated and influenced Google’s own PageRank system, which Google co-founder Larry Page later referenced in his 1998 patent filing.
In 2000, Li co-founded Baidu with Eric Xu, aiming to build a search engine tailored specifically to the Chinese market. He has served as CEO since February 2004, guiding Baidu through its 2005 Nasdaq listing and its evolution from a search company often described as “China’s Google” into a broader technology platform spanning AI, cloud computing, and autonomous driving. Li has said his early interest in artificial intelligence was sparked by undergraduate coursework at Peking and Tsinghua universities, long before AI became central to Baidu’s strategy.
In recent years, Li has positioned Baidu at the center of China’s push to diffuse AI throughout society, investing heavily in large language models and generative AI tools, including the I-RAG text-to-image system introduced to address AI “hallucination” issues. He continues to serve as chairman of iQIYI and sits on the board of New Oriental Education & Technology Group. Known for combining deep technical expertise with long-term strategic focus, Li remains one of the most influential figures shaping China’s domestic AI ecosystem.
