Robin Li Introduces New Metric 'Daily Active Intelligent Agent Count': The Token is Just Overhead; What Really Matters is How Many Agents are Active

According to Watch Beating monitoring, Baidu founder Robin Li made a statement at the Create 2026 Baidu AI Developer Conference: the widely watched Token consumption does not represent the endgame. Token is only a cost, not revenue; it measures input, not output. Whether this Token burn is efficient and what value it has generated cannot be answered by the Token itself.

Robin Li has thus proposed a new metric, DAA (Daily Active Agents), benchmarking the DAU (Daily Active Users) of the mobile internet era. His logic is: when a person owns multiple agents, and an enterprise has hundreds or thousands of agents, the total number will inevitably far exceed the DAU based on population. Currently, the company with the highest global DAU is Meta, exceeding 3.4 billion; Robin Li believes that in the future, the global DAA could easily exceed 10 billion. "How many agents are working for humans and delivering results is closer to value and closer to the essence than meaningless Token consumption."

He used the example of OpenClaw: this was the first time in history that agents replaced models, shifting the AI spotlight from models to applications. Users are not paying for how smart the model is but whether it can help them complete tasks. Based on this, Robin Li divided the AI entrance into two generations: the first generation, represented by ChatGPT, is chatbots, solving information retrieval; the second generation, universal agents, solves task completion, with a "value ceiling higher than chatbots."

Robin Li also claimed that AI is fostering "super-individuals." Previously, the smallest unit of productivity was a team, but now it has become one person plus a team of agents. At the organizational level, each manager can expand from managing 10 people to 30-50 people, with the core function of management shifting from supervision and command to a single word: alignment, ensuring that they are doing the right thing.