Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc. is collaborating with Intel Corp. on a number of artificial intelligence services that leverage the chipmaker’s hardware for superior performance.

Outlined at the Baidu 2018 ABC Summit in Shanghai Tuesday, the new applications are being offered by Baidu Cloud and cover financial services, shipping, video content detection and data storage.

First, Baidu Cloud is using specialized central processing units and a neural network from Intel to offer a “financial cloud” service for Chinese banks. The cloud service employs Intel’s Xeon Scalable processors and its MKL-DNN library to ensure it meets the level of performance that those institutions demand, the companies said.

The new AI shipping solution, meanwhile, is designed to help companies in that sector monitor trucks in real time. It involves deploying “edge devices” that can report back “events” to central offices, so these can better coordinate their shipping operations.

The service includes an “AI video analysis system” that’s able to monitor the trucks as they go about their business and report on any issues that might need to be acted upon immediately. The system, which leverages Intel’s OpenVINO toolkit, can spot any “unusual incidents” such as waste falling from a truck while it’s driving along its route.

On the video content detection side, Baidu Cloud cites the example of iQiyi, which is regarded as the Chinese equivalent to Netflix Inc. Baidu says iQiyi has also adopted the Xeon processors and OpenVINO toolkit to help detect videos that violate its content rules and improve the performance of the services it delivers.

Finally, Baidu and Intel have create a new “AI storage solution” for those involved in AI model training, which is better suited for the performance requirements of those workloads, which require enormous amounts of data to be processed. The AI storage service relies on Intel’s Optane nonvolatile memory technology and its QLC NAND flash solid state drives, the companies said.

In a statement, Intel’s Data Center Group Vice President Raejeanne Skillern said it’s not enough to simply adopt a new chip or framework to enable these kinds of AI workloads.

“What’s required is systems-level integration with software optimization, and Intel is enabling this through our expertise and extensive portfolio of AI technologies – all in the name of helping our customers achieve their AI goals,” Skillern said.

Although its efforts don’t generate the same level of publicity as U.S. firms such as Google LLC and Microsoft Corp., for example, Baidu seems to be emerging as one of the major forces behind AI adoption. Just this week the company introduced a new “no code” service aimed at smaller businesses that allows people without coding skills to develop AI models to enhance their business applications.

The company has also created its own hardware chip for AI called “Kunlun,” which is set to launch later this year, a conversational digital assistant called “Duer OS” and an enterprise-focused AI platform called “Baidu Brain.”

Image: Baidu/Facebook