At the annual Baidu World Conference on November 12, Baidu Inc., China’s leading search engine company, unveiled several significant advancements to its artificial intelligence technology suite.
According to Reuters, these innovations, which include a powerful text-to-image generator named I-RAG and a no-code application builder, represent Baidu’s focus on commercialising AI-driven applications to empower users across industries.
Following years of significant investment in Baidu’s research and development of AI, the company has moved to sell large language model applications to consumers. This put Baidu right in the position with world-leading fellow tech peers like OpenAI, which focuses on providing real-time efficient, intelligent artificial solutions adapted to the Chinese market and other global markets. Finally, CEO Robin Li provided updates about its progress; Baidu’s Ernie platform for natural language processing today handles over 1.5 billion interactions daily, up from 200 million daily queries in May. Ernie is the flagship of Baidu’s AI and was built for a variety of uses in text generation, question-answering support, and more, in the company’s ecosystem.
One of the conference's standout announcements was the launch of I-RAG, Baidu’s advanced text-to-image tool that tackles a common challenge in AI-generated images: “hallucination.” In AI, “hallucination” means that models can put wrong and imaginary objects into images. This way, I-RAG wants to benefit from Baidu’s large search database to generate more realistic and accurate images that are closer to the input text, which will create more precisely tailored results for the users.
In addition to I-RAG, Baidu introduced Miaoda, an application that uses its LLM capabilities to simplify coding, allowing users without extensive coding knowledge to create software applications. This no-code tool makes app development accessible to a wider audience, supporting individuals and businesses eager to leverage AI without requiring technical expertise.
AI commercialization at Baidu not only refers to a single application. Some of the new features have been embedded in current services and these have been provided to external consumers through Baidu Cloud. Moreover, it also demonstrated plenty of AI-related equipment including a smart glasses product developed by Baidu's subsidiary company, Xiaodu. These glasses with cameras and based on the Ernie platform provide voice control and enable users to interact with photos and videos as easily as possible.
Unlike competitors who are optimizing everything in one application, Baidu is using AI in one-appeal applications that can perform unique functions without cluttering them together in one application. This direction is different from ByteDance, which released several separate AI-based applications during the past year.
With such splendid instruments, Baidu is underlining the company’s position as one of the pioneers in the sphere of AI and helps both the ordinary consumer and corporations to boost their efficiency as a result of shaping up better tools and methods for working, creating, and designing.