Baidu Announces New Tools to Promote AI Application Development

Published by Shipra Sanganeria on Apr 25, 2024

Fact-checked by Kate Richards • Fact-checked by Kate Richards

Baidu CEO Robin Li introduced a range of AI tools and development kits during the Baidu AI Developer Conference held on April 16th, 2024. The aim of the new tools is to empower individuals with varying technical expertise to create artificial intelligence applications.

“In China today, there are 1 billion internet users, strong foundation models, sufficient AI application scenarios, and the most complete industrial system in the world,” Li said in his opening speech at Baidu’s 2024 Developer Conference themed, “Everyone is a Developer.’’

Highlighting the growing significance of natural language as the new programming language, Li introduced new additions to ERNIE, Baidu’s ChatGPT-like bot.

Since its launch in 2023, ERNIE amassed a total of 200 million users, with its API managing 200 million daily queries. Li also highlighted the success of Qianfan, the Baidu AI Cloud platform, which has been used by more than 85,000 enterprise clients to create 190,000 AI applications.

With the new additions to ERNIE, including ERNIE 4.0 and Lightweight LLMs like Speed, Lite, and Tiny, the company unveiled three new AI development toolkits. With the new AgentBuilder, AppBuilder, and ModelBuilder kit, coders can quickly and effectively leverage any model customized to suit the complexity of the task.

In addition to its AI tools and vision foundation model for autonomous driving, Apollo VTA (Vision Takes All), the company also announced the launch of the second ERNIE Cup Innovation Challenge. The competition, with a reward totaling RMB 50 million ($7 million USD), aims to inspire visionaries to create and develop new products or applications within the realm of generative AI.

Another notable trend highlighted by Baidu CEO Li during his speech was MoE or “mixture of experts”. According to Li, the future development of AI-based applications will depend on a mixture of different models, the use of small models for certain tasks, and agents that are based on foundation models.

With these new innovations, Baidu aims to drive the adoption of AI and foster a more inclusive technological future. “AI is catalyzing a revolution in creativity. In the future, developing an AI application will be as straightforward as creating a short video. Everyone can be a developer and create,” said Li during the conference.