This year at the Baidu ABC Summit in Shanghai, both Baidu and Intel announced that they are working together on artificial intelligence (AI). This AI is designed for applications ranging from financial services and shipping to video content detection, and is primarily aimed at the leading China banks.
This year at the Baidu ABC Summit in Shanghai, both Baidu and Intel announced that they are working together on artificial intelligence (AI). This AI is designed for applications ranging from financial services and shipping to video content detection, and is primarily aimed at the leading China banks.
On the financial side, the collaboration is a combination of Intel’s Xeon Scalable CPUs and Intel Math Kernel Library-Deep Neural Network that will be deployed in Baidu’s private financial clouds. This will be used specifically for customers such as China Union Pay, AI Bank, and the Agricultural Bank of China. The Intel components help to meet both the performance and security requirements needed in financial services.
Shipping is big business, especially in China. Companies need to be able to monitor where their trucks are in real time to increase operational efficiency and report and issues. To do this Baidu Cloud is working with Intel to accelerate the development of vision applications through an AI video analysis system. Before this, video could only be analyzed after the fact. By leveraging the OpenVINO toolkit, cameras can detect an issue and instantly report it back through a wireless connection.
In China, instead of the video streaming giant Netflix, there is the similar company iQiyi. The Baidu Cloud leverages Intel Xeon Scalable processors to boost iQiyi’s performance as well as using the OpenVINO toolkit, that sees a boost in performance from the CPUs as well. The toolkit is also able to detect videos that violate content rules.
All of the above hinge on AI and Intel and Baidu’s efforts to improve AI usage. The two companies are working on storage solutions that are designed around AI: they need more capacity and performance for the nature of the technology that generates more data. Baidu Cloud leverages both Optane and QLC technology from Intel to tackle this massive data generation. The collaboration between the two company may be more beneficial in the long run to Intel as AI cases will be different for each use case, but such a massive use case as Baidu Cloud will give Intel many new directions to go in as it hones its AI approach.
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