Baidu AI Developer Conference: Kunlun Chip Released for Mass Production of Autonomous Vehicles

Source: Sina Technology

On the afternoon of July 4, Baidu Create 2018 Baidu AI Developer Conference was held at the Beijing National Convention Center this morning. Baidu Brain, intelligent voice interaction platform Duer OS, and autonomous driving technology platform Apollo were all announced to be upgraded at the conference. In addition, Baidu also announced the launch of smart mini-programs, which will open lightweight application development portals to third-party developers in the information flow of Baidu App.

Compared with last year when Robin Li rode a self-driving car to the conference venue, the black technology in this year's conference was not very impressive. However, these demonstrations can show people more clear commercial scenarios.

Following the example of this year's Google I/O, Baidu also presented a demonstration of an AI making a phone call with a human. However, unlike Google's black technology that makes it almost impossible to distinguish whether the other party is a human or a machine, Baidu's AI's answer is still a bit stereotyped, and it was recognized by the person after just a few rounds of the conversation.

In terms of naturalness of speech and handling of awkward questions, Baidu's AI voice response is no longer so "mechanical". When a participant realized that he was talking to AI and asked "How much does Baidu pay robots?", the AI ​​customer service was able to make a joke by saying "Baidu gave me free charging".

Another piece of black technology appeared in the launch demonstration of Baidu Smart Mini Program. Baidu's vice president used the Smart Mini Program to generate a rap in front of rapper Sun Bayi, and automatically added accompaniment.

▲ Robin Li delivered a speech

At the beginning of the speech, Robin Li started to joke about Baidu's repeated delays in mass production of driverless cars, saying "making cars is not making PPTs." However, he then turned the PPT behind him to the Xiamen factory of Jindong Bus, live broadcasting the roll-off ceremony of the driverless bus "Apollo" jointly developed by Baidu and King Long Bus. After mass production, the car will be sent to Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Xiong'an, Tokyo, Japan and other places for operation.

This is not the first appearance of this model. As early as CES and other exhibitions, Baidu has used this model to demonstrate Baidu's driverless technology.

Unlike the sensor components added to traditional cars, the "Apollon" looks more like a square box, and the seat layout inside is also modeled after a bus. According to the existing information, the main application scenarios of driverless buses are closed roads such as parks and communities. Li Yanhong also said that the Japanese side is cooperating with SoftBank to apply it in nuclear power plants and elderly communities.

▲ Robin Li announced that Apollo driverless cars have entered mass production

In his opening speech, Robin Li also mentioned another driverless truck, but did not provide more new information. However, from the appearance, this truck did not continue the appearance of traditional trucks.

In the subsequent Apollo 3.0 release session, the application of autonomous driving in different scenarios such as smart wheelchairs, campus logistics, cleaning vehicles, port transportation, and agricultural picking was demonstrated.

▲ Robin Li announced the cloud-based full-featured AI chip "Kunlun"

Before the Baidu Brain session began, Robin Li had already announced the grand release of the cloud-based full-featured AI chip "Kunlun".

Li Yanhong said that this chip was independently developed by Baidu and will be used in smart cars, voice and imaging and other fields in the future.

Official data shows that the "Kunlun" chip has undergone more than 20 iterations and is currently the AI ​​chip with the highest computing power in the industry. It can provide 260Tops performance at a power consumption of 100+ watts, and can efficiently meet the needs of training and inference at the same time. In addition to cloud requirements such as commonly used deep learning algorithms, it can also adapt to the computing needs of specific terminal scenarios such as natural language processing, large-scale speech recognition, autonomous driving, and large-scale recommendations.

▲ Baidu Senior Vice President Wang Haifeng introduces Baidu Brain 3.0

As for Baidu Brain, the existing technology roadmap has been steadily continued. Wang Haifeng, senior vice president of Baidu and general manager of the AI ​​technology platform system, said when announcing the 3.0 version of Baidu Brain that the platform's average daily call count has exceeded 400 billion times, and the platform has opened more than 110 functions, among which image and face recognition, speech semantics, reading comprehension and other technologies will be applied in new retail, Baidu map speech recognition, Baidu knowledge graph construction and other fields.

It is worth noting that Wang Haifeng focused on demonstrating the application of Baidu Brain in new retail. Combining various technologies of Baidu Brain, retail scenarios can accurately record customers' shopping behaviors and provide customers with precise services. It can be applied in unmanned retail, offline sales upgrades and other fields.

In addition, Paddlepaddle, the underlying foundation of Baidu's AI technology, has also been updated to 3.0, which can realize the rapid construction of an application platform with zero basic threshold.

Intel also announced the results of its cooperation with Baidu in the fields of autonomous driving and artificial intelligence. Baidu will integrate and commercially deploy the Responsibility Sensitive Safety (RSS) model developed by Intel and Mobileye in its open source autonomous driving platform Apollo. At the same time, Baidu also collaborated with Intel's AI business unit to jointly develop "Apollo", the intelligent AI chip camera module Xeye, the optimization of Baidu's deep learning framework PaddlePaddle, and FPGA acceleration and services.

Baidu Smart Mini Programs: A new wall built in the name of openness?

This is the first public appearance of Baidu Smart Mini Program. Simply put, you can think of it as an open upgrade of Baidu's long-standing "frame computing" in mobile terminals and information flow.

In specific operation, when users search for a certain type of service in Baidu App, such as "traffic violation", an interactive portal providing related services will appear at the top of the search information flow. Users can complete interactions such as submitting information and placing orders in the search results without leaving the information flow.

▲Shen Dou, Vice President of Baidu

Baidu Vice President Shen Dou, who is also in charge of Baidu's information flow business, veiledly targeted WeChat's "walled garden" before launching the platform, accusing it of undermining the openness of the Internet and raising costs for developers and users.

However, judging from the situation on the scene, Baidu's mini program may be an upgrade and exploration in the mining of the commercial value of information flow. According to Baidu's recent financial report, the information flow optimized by artificial intelligence has brought huge benefits to Baidu in terms of advertising revenue. Combined with the previous poor reputation in promotion, it is not impossible for Baidu to find a new business model besides advertising.

In fact, the partners revealed some information at the conference: Ctrip attended the conference . When the relevant person in charge introduced the help this function brought to them, he first said that Baidu search is the largest source of customers. Access to Baidu Smart Mini Program has brought huge improvements to both Baidu's user activity data and Ctrip's order conversion efficiency.

After Lu Qi announced his resignation, foreign media reported that Baidu's smart speaker products had poor sales, with a total output of only about 10,000 units. However, in the release of Duer OS 3.0, Jing Kun, general manager of Baidu's smart life business group and chairman of Baidu's artificial intelligence product committee, gave a seemingly good figure.

At the press conference, Jing Kun did not provide specific smart speaker sales data, but he emphasized that the activation volume of Duer OS smart devices has exceeded 90 million, and the monthly active device volume has exceeded 25 million.

▲ Jing Kun released DuerOS 3.0

In addition, Jing Kun also said that in the Chinese market, Duer OS has more than 200 partners. The built-in voice interaction of three popular domestic mobile phones this year: Vivo Nex, Huawei P20, and Oppo Find X is also built on the basis of Duer OS.

In fact, as early as last year, Duer OS 2.0 had already removed terminal products from the technical framework. This year, version 3.0 put more emphasis on providing developers with emotional broadcasting, voiceprint recognition, children's mode, geek mode, intelligent guidance and error correction, video search and video understanding, screen device solutions, Bluetooth device solutions and industry solutions. Vipkid, Changba, and Uncle Kai's Storytelling have all settled in Baidu, and the platform has more than 16,000 developers developing skills.

These updates are clearly aimed at developers, and creating self-branded smart voice products may no longer be Baidu's focus in this area.

Jing Kun introduced that Duer OS 3.0 has opened up a closed-loop ecosystem for business models in China, and developers can earn revenue from Duer OS in four ways. At the event, Baidu also launched a 100 million yuan developer support plan, from which every developer can benefit, especially the interactive skill business sharing model. In the first 6 months, 100% of the skill revenue will be returned to the developer.

Since Lu Qi announced his resignation on May 19, whether Baidu will continue to adhere to its AI strategy has been the focus of speculation from all sides. In the past month, Baidu has successively reported the resignation of Baidu Vice President Wang Lu, former Raven Technology founder Lv Cheng and others. However, at today's developer conference, Baidu AI's three major businesses all continued to develop along the lines announced at last year's AI Developer Conference. Wang Lu himself also appeared at the venue, which can somewhat dispel some doubts about Baidu's future.

It is worth noting that Baidu Smart Mini Program, which was newly launched this year, is ranked after Baidu Brain, which introduces basic technologies. It is a technology application platform for developers, along with Duer OS and Apollo, which shows its status in the Baidu system. Shen Dou, the person in charge of related businesses, is also the person in charge of Baidu App, information flow and other mobile ecosystem-related businesses. In the company's structure, he reports to Xiang Hailong, the person in charge of the search company. However, according to Caijing, due to the importance of the spy, Shen Dou could report directly to Lu Qi before, and Robin Li would also personally inquire about its related businesses.

This may be seen as a signal that Baidu's search business will also fully enter AI.

According to Baidu's latest financial report, search advertising revenue still accounts for the majority of the company's revenue. Although it has announced its transformation to AI, technologies such as driverless cars and voice recognition are more oriented towards the back end of the industry, and the industry has not yet entered a period of explosive growth, so the release of commercial value is still a long way off.

How to find a path to quickly realize commercial value for AI technology? The answer may lie in search. On May 21, two days after Lu Qi announced his resignation, Baidu announced the divestment of the majority stake in its global advertising tool business and its full entry into the AI ​​industry. Xiang Hailong, who is in charge of the search business, said that the direction of AI will not change, and also revealed in advance that Baidu will officially launch the smart mini program in July.

As mentioned above, from the information revealed at this conference, Baidu Smart Mini Programs is positioned more to attract Internet business service providers to enter the Baidu platform and bring commercial value to developers by improving operational efficiency. Although it is also aimed at developers, since it does not involve hardware, manufacturing, regulations, infrastructure and other links, the purely Internet-oriented Mini Programs will be promoted faster than other businesses, and the added value brought by the services can also attract merchants to pay.

In general, Baidu's positioning is shifting to a behind-the-scenes supporter of AI technology. Although Baidu still operates products such as search, Tieba, and Zhidao, its future core business may be increasingly distant from the perception of end users. After Lu Qi leaves, how this path will continue may still depend on Li Yanhong's own performance.

"Xinshiye's media"