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Baidu has unveiled synthetic intelligence-powered good glasses as Chinese language tech teams race with world rivals to capitalise on AI-integrated {hardware}.
Li Ying, head of Baidu’s {hardware} model Xiaodu, stated its good glasses would “change into a non-public assistant” throughout a Baidu occasion in Shanghai on Tuesday.
The glasses are run on Baidu’s massive language mannequin Ernie and can allow wearers to trace calorie consumption, ask questions on their setting, play music and shoot movies, stated the corporate.
Whereas China is lagging behind the US in creating probably the most highly effective massive language fashions, specialists have stated Chinese language tech teams might leverage the nation’s refined electronics sector to develop aggressive shopper {hardware} built-in with AI. Baidu’s glasses will initially solely be bought in China.
The corporate’s entry into good glasses comes as US tech teams Meta and Snap are dashing to dominate the market exterior China. Meta has teamed up with Ray-Ban on a sequence of good glasses, with a pair promoting for as a lot as $379. They aren’t accessible on the market in China.
The launch of Baidu’s good glasses, that are anticipated to go on sale subsequent yr, alerts the beginning of a battle among the many nation’s main web teams to change into the main supplier of AI-integrated {hardware}. Beforehand, good glasses had been largely undertaken by start-ups.
Xiaodu has embedded Ernie Bot into current merchandise together with a digital dashboard for households to assist monitor aged kin, who can discuss to AI medical doctors and obtain reminders to take treatment by way of a tool.
Final month, TikTok proprietor ByteDance launched its first pair of earbuds, which permit customers to speak on to the corporate’s Doubao chatbot with out utilizing their smartphone.
“The magic that Chinese language expertise corporations have constantly displayed is arising with compelling shopper merchandise at aggressive worth factors,” stated Paul Triolo, accomplice and world tech coverage lead at consultancy Albright Stonebridge Group. “This may give them an edge over international corporations in integrating AI into helpful functions at scale.”
Baidu, which operates China’s dominant search engine, was main the race to develop the nation’s model of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Ernie Bot — whose cellular model was not too long ago rebranded as Wenxiaoyan — has since been overtaken by ByteDance’s Doubao.
Doubao is now the main chatbot in China as measured by month-to-month energetic customers, based on market intelligence service Sensor Tower. It was the fifth-most downloaded AI app worldwide from January to August, behind ChatGPT and Google Gemini, stated Sensor Tower.
Robin Li, Baidu’s co-founder and chief govt, additionally introduced a brand new AI picture generator iRAG on Tuesday. Li claimed that the picture generator had fewer hallucinations on account of retrieval-augmented era (RAG), a way for enhancing the accuracy of responses with info fetched from exterior sources.
“Over the previous yr, the largest change in AI has been the elimination of hallucinations, utilizing RAG to extend the reliability and accuracy of fashions,” stated the Baidu chief govt.
Whereas Tencent and Alibaba’s shares have rallied this yr, Baidu’s has fallen by 26 per cent since January after buyers had been underwhelmed by its AI choices and anxious about falling promoting revenues. Baidu generates the majority of its gross sales from promoting on its search engine.
