Baidu surprises with huge ambitions

Baidu surprises with huge ambitions

Beijing, 3/16/2021

Baidu’s AI chip business Kunlun has received a fresh injection of funds. The round of investors was led by CITIC Private Equity Funds Management (CPE), a Chinese private equity firm. Other backers included IDG Capital, Legend Capital and Oriza Hua.
The funding comes at the right time. Baidu is considering bringing its AI chip design to market and making Kunlun a standalone company. Kunlun is a cloud-to-edge AI chip that Baidu uses in its cloud computing technologies and electric vehicles.
In addition to Kunlun, Baidu offers a conversational AI platform called DuerOS for home appliances. The search giant continues to work to integrate AI technologies into nearly all of its businesses, including its search engine, drug discovery efforts and self-driving vehicles through the open-source Apollo platform.
Other AI offerings include a system that measures the temperature of passengers in a Beijing train station, the LinearFold RNA prediction algorithm, the PaddlePaddle deep learning platform for industrial AI, and the ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge Integration) language model.
In 2018, Baidu became the first Chinese company to join the Partnership on AI coalition to support responsible AI use. The group’s founding members include Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, DeepMind, Microsoft and IBM.