Baidu

15 Posts

Laptop displaying the Baidu logo and tablet displaying OpenAI's ChatGPT website homepage
Baidu

China Chases Chatbots: Chinese tech companies race to cash in on ChatGPT fever.

ChatGPT fever has reached China despite legal and technical barriers. Two months after its debut, ChatGPT is a viral sensation on Chinese social media, MIT Technology Review reported. Companies in that country are racing to cash in.
Godzilla with the Google logo and Kong with the Microsoft logo, fighting
Baidu

Search War!: Google and Microsoft both announce AI-Powered search.

The long-dormant struggle to dominate the web-search business reignited in a display of AI-driven firepower — and hubris. Google and Microsoft announced competing upgrades powered by the latest generation of chatbots. Baidu, too, flexed its natural-language-processing muscles.
Animated overview of PP-Matting
Baidu

Automating Mattes for Visual Effects: New ML Method Produces Image Mattes Easier

Researchers at Baidu introduced PP-Matting, an architecture that, given an image, estimates the transparency of pixels surrounding foreground objects to create mattes without requiring additional input.
Illustration shows different self-attention mechanisms used by Transformer-based AI models.
Baidu

Attention to Rows and Columns: Altering Transformers' Self-Attention Mechanism for Greater Efficiency

A new approach alters transformers' self-attention mechanism to balance computational efficiency with performance on vision tasks.
Overall architecture of GEM.
Baidu

What a Molecule’s Structure Reveals: Baidu Creates AI to Classify Molecular Properties

The authors trained a modified GNN on a dataset of 18 million molecules to find molecular properties.
Someone ordering a cab service with an app
Baidu

Autonomy Becomes Autonomous: Beijing Allows Self-Driving Cars From Baidu and Pony

In Beijing, self-driving cars are rolling without a driver behind the wheel. China’s capital city authorized Pony.ai and Apollo Go, a Baidu subsidiary, to deploy self-driving taxis without a human in the driver’s seat.
Animated video showing an image generator imitating brush strokes
Baidu

Different Strokes for Robot Folks: Transformer-Based Image Generator Imitates Painters

A neural network can make a photo resemble a painting via neural style transfer, but it can also learn to reproduce an image by applying brush strokes. A new method taught a system this painterly skill without any training data.
Results of survey about how AI Engineers vs US public feel about ethical issues
Baidu

AI Engineers Weigh In on AI Ethics: Survey Shows How AI Engineers Feel About Ethical Issues

Machine learning researchers tend to trust international organizations, distrust military forces, and disagree on how much disclosure is necessary when describing new models, a new study found.
AI system monitoring urban traffic
Baidu

Meet the New Smart-Cities Champ: Chinese researchers win prizes for AI traffic safety.

Chinese researchers for the first time swept a competition to develop AI systems that monitor urban traffic. Chinese universities and companies won first and second place place in all five categories of the 2021 AI City Challenge.
Map of China pointing specific places in red
Baidu

AI Against Covid Progress Report: How Chinese authorities used AI to fight Covid

A new report details the role of AI in China’s effort to fight the coronavirus. Researchers at Synced, a China-based AI publication, describe how nearly 90 machine learning products have contributed to the country’s pandemic response.
Partnership in AI, Amazon, Baidu, Google, Facebook, IBM, Microsoft logos
Baidu

Baidu Leaves Partnership on AI: Chinese tech giant exits a consortium on AI bias and privacy.

Baidu backed out of a U.S.-led effort to promote ethics in AI, leaving the project without a Chinese presence. The Beijing-based search giant withdrew from the Partnership on AI, a consortium that promotes cooperation on issues like digital privacy and algorithmic bias.
Screen captures from videos generated by VidPress
Baidu

Text to Video in Two Minutes: Baidu's VidPress generates video from text.

Will reading soon become obsolete? A new system converts text articles into videos. VidPress, a prototype project from Chinese tech giant Baidu, currently generates more than 1,000 narrated video summaries of news stories daily.
Covid-19 illustration
Baidu

Tools For a Pandemic: Chinese tech giants provide resources for Covid research.

Chinese tech giants have opened their AI platforms to scientists fighting coronavirus. Alibaba Cloud and Baidu are offering a powerful weapon to life-science researchers working to stop the spread of the illness officially known as Covid-19: free access to their computing horsepower and tools.
Illustration of a fireplace with "Happy holidays" cards in English, Spanish and French
Baidu

Natural Language Processing Models Get Literate: Why 2019 was a breakthrough year for NLP

Earlier language models powered by Word2Vec and GloVe embeddings yielded confused chatbots, grammar tools with middle-school reading comprehension, and not-half-bad translations. The latest generation is so good, some people consider it dangerous.
Sesame Street characters together
Baidu

Inside AI’s Muppet Empire: Why Are So Many NLP Models Named After Muppets?

As language models show increasing power, a parallel trend has received less notice: The vogue for naming models after characters in the children’s TV show Sesame Street.

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