• By quade
• 17 April 2024

Baidu Reveals App Development AI Tools to Promote Website Creation

One year after the release of the Ernie bot, a ChatGPT-like model, Baidu announced the creation of additional AI tools to fit their growing product line. These will include app development AI tools that will encourage locals to enter the world of web development.

These tools were made in response to China’s lag in AI capabilities, especially compared to the US. They created these tools to allow people with minimal coding experience to have the capabilities to create chatbots and AI services for specific services, allowing for greater digitization across different industries. These can then be integrated with Baidu’s search services.

Baidu’s Strides in App Development AI Tools

Many of the upcoming app development AI tools will offer free trial programs, offering usage limits similar to Google Cloud’s AIs. These include three new versions of their existing Ernie AI called “Speed,” “Lite” and “Tiny” which offer some coding access.

So far, Ernie has been a major player in the tech space, amassing more than 200 million users since its launch last year, including 85,000 business clients. This huge volume resulted in 200 million programs accessing its services each day and more than 190,000 AI applications being created. These applications are used in customer service, coding, and Multilingual IT Support Outsourcing.

“It feels like their focus is on building the entire native AI development ecosystem, providing a full set of development tools and platform solutions,” 

-Bo Du, managing director at WestSummit Capital Management.

“In China today, there are 1 billion internet users, strong foundation models, sufficient AI application scenarios and the most complete industrial system in the world. Everyone can be a developer.”

– Robin Li, CEO of Baidu.

How Are the App Development AI Tools Used?

Throughout the recent showcase, Baidu emphasized how their app development AI tools are aimed at creating applications for consumers, including tourism, content creation like picture books, and scheduling meetings. These could have been used in places like onshore data processing specialists as well.

They demonstrated this by having different Baidu business divisions apply the AI to their services with virtual hosts conducting livestreams and teering search engine traffic towards AI-powered interactive purchasing guides.

Buysmart.AI, the winner of Baidu’s AI contest last year, used this technology for an online shopping aid linked to Weibo. The startup also announced its utilization of ChatGPT for an independent interactive e-commerce application targeting the U.S. market.

Aside from the AI, Baidu also presented a robot developed by Shenzhen-based UBTech Robotics. This machine also uses Baidu’s app development AI tools to interpret commands and read words. While the exact effects of these tools are not fully understood, Baidu will continue rolling out these tools. They hope these can be used in customer service, voice assistants, and internet-connected devices.

There are even hopes that the AI could be trained in legal consultation or medical diagnosis to assist experts there. Baidu also emphasized their app development AI tools can provide top-notch AI code, something which Silicon Valley believes has the most potential. Baidu themselves have already had 27% of their code coming from AI.

If this is true, the resulting benefits could be significant in sectors outside of China such as with our BPO IT Cost Reduction.

Supply Shortages For AI Tools

The global race for advancing generative AI has led to some supply chain issues, especially for semiconductors which are an important component as they are used for computing. China has been acutely affected as they also have to deal with US export restrictions.

Despite these looming issues, Baidu did not mention anything about supply shortages in their company, simply saying that there might be supply chain issues in the future, but that their current reserves should be enough.