"One thing we learned from DeepSeek is that open-sourcing the best models can greatly help adoption," said Baidu's Robin Li.

Investment in data centres and cloud infrastructure is still needed despite DeepSeek challenging the cost efficiency of large AI models, Baidu CEO Robin Li said on Tuesday.

DeepSeek is spurring competitors at home and abroad to consider an open-source strategy in artificial intelligence (AI) development, following the Chinese start-up's release of powerful low-cost models that upended how large language models (LLMs) are trained.

AI-generated content now appears in 22% of search result pages, with efforts focused on quality and relevance,” Li said during the earnings call.

Chinese search engine group Baidu said on Tuesday that the success of AI company DeepSeek had inspired it to embrace an open source model, under which the source code of its upcoming generative AI chatbot release will be publicly available.