Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc. has unveiled a new toolkit for quantum machine learning, known as Paddle Quantum.

The toolkit, newly open-sourced Wednesday, comes with several quantum computing applications and is meant to be used by developers to build and train quantum neural network models. It’s built atop the company’s deep learning platform PaddlePaddle, which is used power its artificial intelligence services.

Paddle Quantum, available now on GitHub, is comprised of a set of quantum machine learning toolkits. They include a quantum chemistry library plus optimization tools and three quantum apps: machine learning, chemical simulation and combinatorial optimization.

Baidu said Paddle Quantum can be used to support quantum circuit models and general quantum computing research. For example, it can be used to simplify the implementation of a promising quantum algorithm, called the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm, by 50%.

“Researchers in the quantum field can use the Paddle Quantum to develop quantum artificial intelligence, and deep-learning enthusiasts have a shortcut to learning quantum computing,” said Duan Runyao, director of Baidu’s Institute for Quantum Computing.

Baidu also announced a number of new tools that provide a total of 27 enhanced features for the PaddlePaddle framework. The tools include Paddle.js, which is a deep learning JavaScript library that enables developers to use AI within a browser or mini-programs for applications such as WeChat.

Another tool is Parakeet, which is a text-to-speech toolkit that supports models including ClariNet and WaveFlow. Then there’s Paddle X, which is an integration development tool that enables faster data processing.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that Baidu’s newest toolkit is a sign of maturation of the quantum computing market, where the battle has moved away from hardware architecture to software, platforms and frameworks.

“It’s good to see vendors like Baidu open source their frameworks, which are a huge help for enterprises to build quantum-powered next-generation applications,” Mueller said. “As with all open source projects, adoption matter and we have to see how widely Paddle is being used in a few months.”

Baidu also provided a general update on PaddlePaddle’s adoption, saying it’s now being used by more than 1.9 million developers at 84,000 businesses. So far, about 230,000 deep learning models have been created using the platform.

“Now is an unprecedented opportunity for the development of PaddlePaddle given the rise of industrial intelligence and the acceleration of AI-powered infrastructure,” said Baidu Chief Technology Officer Wang Haifeng. “We will continue to embrace the open-source spirit, drive technological innovation, and partner with developers to advance deep learning and AI technologies and speed up the process of industrial intelligence.”

Photo: Cloud Computing/Flickr