China has made no secret of its desire to lead the world in artificial intelligence, and early Wednesday in Beijing one of its top technology companies took another step toward helping it reach that goal.

Baidu Inc., China’s leading search engine provider, said at its Create 2018 developer conference it was updating its Baidu Brain platform to provide greater access to its suite of AI tools for both businesses and individuals. The company also unveiled a new high-performance chip for AI workloads, and said it was beginning volume production of China’s first autonomously driven buses, which are due to be deployed in a number of Chinese cities later this year.

Baidu Brain 3.0 is a developer-focused platform that offers simple access to a range of the company’s AI and machine learning tools via application programming interfaces. The tools include Baidu’s facial recognition, natural language understanding and video understanding models. With Baidu Brain, the company is providing a way for both developers and those without coding skills to build AI-enabled applications quickly using drag-and-drop methods.

Baidu offered up a few examples of apps created by early users of the platform, including a new vision model built by a doctor based in Tibet that can identify more than 40 kinds of parasitic worms with 97 percent accuracy. In a second example, researchers trained a vision system to identify wildlife automatically at a natural conservation in Northeastern China to collect data for animal protection.

“The demand for AI and machine learning is increasing rapidly, but the lack of infrastructure and technology know-how is preventing smaller businesses from adopting AI,” said Haifeng Wang, senior vice president and head of Baidu’s Artificial Intelligence Group. “By opening up our resources in algorithms, computing and big data, Baidu is gradually breaking this barrier down to allow everyone to access AI in the most convenient and equitable way.”

It’s all very well being able to build AI apps easily, but it’s quite another thing to be able to run them at scale. With that in mind, Baidu also announced what it saidis China’s “first cloud-to-edge AI chip” called Kunlun (pictured above), available in two flavors: the Kunlun 818-300 for AI training and the Kunlun 818-100 for inference, or running the models.

Baidu said the new chips were based on the designs of its field-programmable gate arrays, which are computing hardware accelerators designed to boost the performance of regular central processing unit chips so they can perform more intensive workloads. The Kunlun chips are said to be 30 times more powerful than Baidu’s original FPGAs, which it built in 2011, and can support a wide range of AI applications including voice recognition, search ranking, natural language processing and autonomous driving.

Kunlun’s usefulness in AI speech applications is critical for Baidu as a search provider, since speech is growing in popularity as a primary method for search, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc.

“Speech is the platform that is easiest for consumers and all search vendors will need to support it well,” he told SiliconANGLE. “Baidu is no exception, and revving up its AI capabilities is the right way to go. Once the [Kunlun] architecture is more mature, it’ll be easier to attract developers to build next-generation applications on Baidu’s platforms.”

The chip’s autonomous driving capabilities, meanwhile, could come in handy for the company’s self-driving buses (below), which are now entering volume production with a view to hitting China’s streets later this year. Baidu said the “Apolong” is China’s first Level 4 fully autonomous minibus and is powered by the latest version of its Apollo autonomous driving system.

The buses are said to be capable of “obstacle avoidance, swerving and automatic transshipment,” but the ambitions are rather modest at this point. China, like other nations, has yet to allow fully autonomous vehicles on its public roads, so Baidu intends the buses to be used in enclosed areas such as airports and certain tourist spots that are off-limits to regular traffic. The buses are due to be deployed in Beijing, Shenzhen, Pingtan and Wuhan later this year, as well as Tokyo next year via a partnership with SB Drive Corp., the autonomous driving subsidiary of Japan’s SoftBank Group.

Images: Baidu