BEIJING, April 5th (ABP) – Intern journalists from different countries of the African continent being in China from late February 2024 under the supervision of China International Press Communication Center (CIPCC), continue to see with their own eyes China’s various achievements in the key sectors contributing a lot to the country’s economic growth.
During their visit to the headquarters of Baidu company in Beijing, journalists got to know about this company’s spectacular achievements; its work in Artificial Intelligence (AI), autonomous driving, digital human and other tech innovations; its smart home products as well as its efforts in public welfare and corporate social responsibility.
Baidu is a leading Al company with strong Internet foundation. It is one of the few companies in the world that provides full-stack Al technologies such as Al chips, software architectures, and program applications. Baidu is rated as one of the four largest Al companies in the world. With the mission of “make transportation simpler and better through technology”, Baidu adheres to technological innovation, and is committed to “become the world’s top high-tech company that understands users best, and to help people grow”.
Baidu began to deploy autonomous driving in 2013, and in 2017 launched “Apollo”, the world’s first open platform for autonomous driving. At present, Baidu Apollo has industry-leading solutions in three major fields such as autonomous driving, intelligent cars, and smart transportation. With more than 210 global ecological partners, 80,000 global developers, and 700,000 lines of open-source code, Baidu Apollo has expanded from the field of autonomous driving to the entire smart transportation system.
Beijing Yizhuang Apollo Park is the world’s largest test site for autonomous driving and V2X collaboration applications. It inherits the ecological vitality of Baidu Al technology gene and Apollo platform. By creatively integrating Baidu Apollo’s leading technology and products in various fields such as autonomous driving, intelligent cars, and smart transportation, Yizhuang Apollo Park creates an intelligent network-based ecology with the core of “vehicle-road-cloud-map”.
Practically, journalists felt the reality on the site. They got in self-driving cars and realized that the latter are responsible for all driving activities including perceiving the environment, monitoring important systems, and controlling the vehicle, including navigating from origin to destination. They also witnessed another self-driving taxi without steering wheel, a new autonomous vehicle, sixth generation, also called “robot taxi” which does not need human intervention.
To that end, the company’s communicators told reporters that Baidu is fully determined to rebuild all product lines with AI-native thinking, to keep on making the complicated world simpler through technology, without forgetting to continuously cultivate AI talents. For instance, Baidu has already trained over 4.2 million talents in AI, and in its AI talent cultivation plan, it aims to train another 5 million talents in foundation model field.
Note that all those African journalists were certified for having experienced the trial ride in the self-driving car.