Baidu's Robin Li Introduces Daily Active Agents (DAA) Metric at Create 2026, Predicting Global DAA to Exceed 10 Billion

According to Beating, at Create 2026 Baidu AI Developer Conference, Baidu founder Robin Li introduced a new metric called Daily Active Agents (DAA), positioning it as the successor to Daily Active Users (DAU) in the mobile internet era. Li argued that token consumption does not reflect true value—tokens represent input costs, not output value. He proposed DAA as a better measure of AI productivity.

Li noted that as individuals and enterprises deploy multiple agents, total DAA could far exceed human population-based DAU figures. Meta currently leads in DAU with over 3.4 billion users; Li predicted global DAA could easily surpass 10 billion. "How many agents are actively working for humans and delivering results is closer to true value than meaningless token consumption," Li stated.