AI TRENDS | Baidu Founder Proposes New Metric for AI Era at Create2026 Conference

On May 13, during the opening ceremony of the Create2026 Baidu AI Developer Conference, Baidu founder Robin Li introduced a new metric for the AI era, termed 'Daily Active Agents' (DAA). According to Jin10, this metric is proposed as a counterpart to the widely used 'Daily Active Users' (DAU) in the mobile internet sector. Li explained that while Token consumption is currently a near-consensus metric in the industry, it primarily represents cost rather than revenue, measuring input rather than output. He emphasized that as humanity enters the era of intelligent agents, evaluating the prosperity of a platform and ecosystem should focus more on the DAA metric, which considers how many agents are actively working for humans and delivering results. This approach, Li argued, is closer to value and essence than the mere consumption of Tokens.