Baidu and NVIDIA announced their joint AI tech partnership in cloud computing, self-driving cars and smart home assistants

In a keynote address at this year’s Baidu AI developer conference, the company’s president and COO Qi Lu announced plans to work closely with NVIDIA. Both companies aim to bring AI to cloud computing, self-driving vehicles, and smart home assistants.

For a start, Baidu Cloud has plans to use next-gen NVIDIA Volta GPUs to power its deep learning platform. The Baidu Cloud has already incorporated NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs and its accompanying NVIDIA deep learning framework. This new move will allow Baidu Cloud Computing enterprise customers to leverage on the upcoming Tesla Volta V100 GPUs, as well as the Tesla P4 GPU accelerators. The upgraded GPU compute platform will be deployed on NVIDIA HGX architecture. On a side note, the next-gen NVIDIA Volta GPU is slated for a Q3 launch this year.

Besides making use of NVIDIA’s deep learning framework, Baidu also aims to optimize its own open source deep learning framework, PaddlePaddle, for NVIDIA Volta GPUs, and avail its deep learning solution to academics and researchers.

The Chinese web titan has plans for end-consumers as well, it will adopt NVIDIA’s Drive PX platform to its own open source self-driving car initiative known as Apollo. Baidu wants to collaborate with major Chinese car makers to develop self-driving cars, and the manufacturers include Changan, Chery Automobile, FAW, and Greatwall Motor.

For the local Chinese market, Baidu wants to add its Baidu DuerOS, the company’s conversational AI system, to NVIDIA Shield TV system. This move provides NVIDIA Shield TV with voice command capabilities that are tailored for the local Chinese market. The localized version of Shield TV is expected to hit the China market this year.

(Source: NVIDIA)

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.