China’s Baidu has teamed up with Intel to boost AI capabilities across financial services, logistics and video streaming, working with the multinational to power applications for Baidu private cloud customers, the two announced.
Speaking at the Baidu 2018 ABC Summit in Shanghai this week, Intel VP Raejeanne Skillern said simply integrating top-end hardware was no longer enough to ensure AI could be exploited in the commercial realm: “What’s required is systems-level integration with software optimisation.”
Intel describes itself as investing in a “holistic approach” to AI, saying it is investing in “developing unique solutions for customers across central processing units, storage and the network”, in a release shared Wednesday.
Gadi Singer, GM for Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel commented in a blog post that: “From enabling in-device intelligence, to providing data center scale on Intel Xeon Scalable processors, to accelerating workloads with Intel FPGAs, to making it simpler for PaddlePaddle developers to code across platforms, Baidu is taking advantage of Intel’s products and expertise to bring its latest AI advancements to life.”
iQiyi and Chill?
Among the case studies they demonstrated was work to improve content analysis for “China’s Netflix”, iQiyi. iQiyi adopted the OpenVINO toolkit to detect videos that violate the content rules and achieved “performance improvements on the existing platform, and an extra performance improvement on Baidu Cloud powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors”, the two said.
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Another case study was Baidu Cloud’s attempt to establish real-time connections via the cloud and edge computing across a network of logistic svehicles. Currently if trucks are fitted with a camera you have to wait for the truck to return to base before you can gather that data and run analytics on it.
With Intel’s OpenVINO toolkit Baidu is deploying vehicles fitted with camera equipment that can analyse and report vehicle collisions or stock falling from the truck cargo hold onto the road.
Founded in 2000 and headquarted in Beijing, Baidu is a major internet service provider in China and Asia. The company develops a wide range of applications and services ranging from an internet search engine, a social networking service to antivirus software.
