China’s Baidu Inc, opens new tab unveiled a slew of new applications for its artificial intelligence technology on Tuesday, including an enhanced text-to-image generation technology and a tool that enables users to develop software applications without coding expertise.
The country’s leading search engine company is among tech firms shifting their focus to the commercialization of large language model (LLM) applications after nearly two years of heavy investment in research and development in models that they tout as alternatives to OpenAI’s GPT.
At the annual Baidu World Conference, CEO Robin Li introduced I-RAG, a text-to-image technology that leverages Baidu’s search capabilities to address the “hallucination” issue, referring to the generation of images that deviate from the input text or contain non-existent elements.
These interactions include tasks such as generating text, answering questions, and assisting with various applications utilizing AI.The company integrate the technology into its existing product lineup and offering it to external users via its cloud services.
Baidu also unveiled a pair of glasses featuring a built-in AI assistant, developed by it hardware division, Xiaodu. The device will run on the company’s ERNIE generative AI technology and was designed to “become a private assistant”.Users will be able to interact with the device using their voice and ask it questions about what it sees in their current environment. They can also tell it to play music and even track their calories consumption. And since the glasses are equipped with cameras, they can ask it to snap photos or take videos.
The company is not aiming to create a “super app” based on AI, Li said, signalling a divergence in strategy from other companies such as ByteDance, which has launched multiple standalone AI apps this year.
Baidu also introduced Miaoda,the no-code platform, will allow users who don’t have coding knowledge to create app prototypes. The company says the platform will use Ernie’s LLM to generate code that can be easily modified and edited.