Baidu, an Internet company, announced its plans to increase investments in technological infrastructure such as AI, data centers, cloud computing, and chips in the next ten years. As per the company, its intelligent cloud servers will reach over 5 million by 2030, which should be seven times powerful than the combined computing power of the world’s top 500 supercomputers. Moreover, the company plans to train 5 million AI talents within the coming five years that will assist in providing an AI talent pool for the development of China’s smart economy and society.
Baidu has worked with more than 200 China-based higher education institutions in order to develop courses related to deep learning and AI and as per the report, AI has become the fastest expanding discipline at Chinese universities. This is largely owing to the country’s ambitions to become a global leader in the field of AI.
Baidu currently has data centers operating in many parts of the country. As the largest search engine in China, the company’s flagship Yangquan data center provides over 1 million square feet of available space and is able to host 120,000 servers storing 4,000 petabytes of information. The company has also trained more than 1 million AI talents and cooperated with over 200 universities to provide deep learning and artificial intelligence courses.
Baidu always tries to bring innovation to the world. In 2018, the corporate introduced the EZDL service platform, promoting it as a way to build custom, artificial intelligence models, using a drag-and-drop interface. The platform involves three primary capabilities, image classification, object detection, and sound classification. In the same year, Baidu announced the establishment of the Institute for Quantum Computing, with the aim to build bridges between quantum computing and AI. The company announced a quantum machine learning development toolkit Paddle Quantum which can assist scientists and developers to build and train quantum neural network models.
Based on Baidu’s deep learning platform Paddle Paddle, Paddle Quantum designs to support advanced quantum computing applications and developers in the quantum field to use the Paddle Quantum to develop quantum artificial intelligence. Along with the release of Paddle Quantum, the corporate has also announced seven new tools, with 27 improved features for the upgrade of PaddlePaddle, which is seeing strong adoption with over 1.9 million developers. According to Baidu, as of May 2020, more than 84,000 enterprises have used PaddlePaddle to make over 230,000 models.
