Baidu has unveiled synthetic intelligence-powered good glasses as Chinese language tech teams race with international rivals to capitalise on AI-integrated {hardware}.
Li Ying, head of Baidu’s {hardware} model Xiaodu, mentioned its good glasses would “turn into a non-public assistant” throughout a Baidu occasion in Shanghai on Tuesday.
The glasses are run on Baidu’s large language model Ernie and can allow wearers to trace calorie consumption, ask questions on their atmosphere, play music and shoot movies, mentioned the corporate.
Whereas China is lagging behind the US in creating essentially the most highly effective giant language fashions, consultants have mentioned Chinese language tech teams might leverage the nation’s refined electronics sector to develop aggressive client {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 outdoors China. Meta has teamed up with Ray-Ban on a collection of good glasses, with a pair promoting for as a lot as $379. They don’t seem to be obtainable on the market in China.
The launch of Baidu’s good glasses, that are anticipated to go on sale subsequent 12 months, alerts the beginning of a battle among the many nation’s main web teams to turn 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 family, who can discuss to AI medical doctors and obtain reminders to take treatment by 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 developing with compelling client merchandise at aggressive worth factors,” mentioned Paul Triolo, accomplice and international tech coverage lead at consultancy Albright Stonebridge Group. “This can give them an edge over international corporations in integrating AI into helpful purposes 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 cell model was lately 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, in line with market intelligence service Sensor Tower. It was the fifth-most downloaded AI app worldwide from January to August, behind ChatGPT and Google Gemini, mentioned 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 because of retrieval-augmented era (RAG), a way for enhancing the accuracy of responses with data fetched from outdoors sources.
“Over the previous 12 months, the most important change in AI has been the elimination of hallucinations, utilizing RAG to extend the reliability and accuracy of fashions,” mentioned the Baidu chief govt.
Whereas Tencent and Alibaba’s shares have rallied this 12 months, Baidu’s has fallen by 26 per cent since January after buyers had been underwhelmed by its AI offerings and anxious about falling promoting revenues. Baidu generates the majority of its gross sales from promoting on its search engine.
