Nvidia Joins Forces With Chinese Internet Giant Baidu To Push AI Tech Adoption

Nvidia has joined forces with Chinese Internet giant Baidu to work on artificial intelligence (AI), spreading its use into cloud data centres, autonomous vehicles and the homes of Chinese citizens.

Baidu will make use of Nvidia’s Drive PX 2 autonomous driving platform in its own Apollo self-driving car platform. Other car makers will also benefit form the partnership as they will be granted access to the technology of both companies in order to get driverless cars onto Chinese roads.

The partnership follows in the tracks of Nivida’s recent joining of forces with car manufacturers such as Toyota Volvo and Audi.

AI partnership

But the AI partnership extends beyond just driverless cars, as Baidu’s chief operating officer Qi Lu noted that the companies will combine their AI work to boost academic research and help bolster Baidu’s PaddlePaddle deep learning platform.

“We’ll also work closely to make PaddlePaddle the best deep learning framework; advance our conversational AI system, DuerOS; and accelerate research at the Institute of Deep Learning,” said Lu.

Nvidia is also providing Baidu with its Tesla Volta V1000 and Tesla P4 graphics accelerators, which uses parallel processing to power deep learning algorithms. Baidu will use Nvidia’s hardware in its data centres to provide is customers with cloud-based access to a Nvidia powered PaddlePaddle deep learning framework so that Baidu’s customers can harness AI technology and create smart products on top of the technology the partnership yields.

Finally, Baidu’s conversational AI system, DuerOS will be integrated with the Nvidia Shield TV in the Chinese market to allow the game, media and smart home streaming hub to be controlled with Chinese voice commands.

The partnership is indicative of both Nvidia’s ambitions to push its AI technology further afield, and a wider trend of AI and smart systems growing in prominence within the technology industry, despite fears of the potential negative ramifications autonomous systems could have on the job market, businesses and society.

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