Baidu has debuted version 7.0 of its open AI platform Brain alongside reporting that mass production has begun of its second-gen Kunlun chip.

The tech giant is often considered as “China’s Google” and, just like its Western counterpart, is one of the largest AI companies in the world.

“AI technology is growing increasingly complex, and integrated innovation has made AI more powerful,” said Haifeng Wang, CTO of Baidu.

“As AI technology plays an expanding role in a wider range of industries and drives a new era of technological revolution and industrial transformation, it is increasingly important to lower the threshold for different real-world applications and to increase accessibility to AI development platforms.”

At Baidu World 2021, the company made two significant AI announcements.

The first is Baidu Brain 7.0 which promises deeper integration of knowledge sources and deep learning. The open platform now features language comprehension and reasoning.

Baidu’s latest AI platform version works in tandem with the company’s new Kunlun II chip. The chip uses a 7nm process to match the current leaders including Graphcore and Huawei.

Kunlun II is equipped with Baidu’s second-gen XPU architecture. Over the previous generation, Baidu claims the latest Kunlun chip offers 2-3x more processing power.

The latest chip from Baidu works with the company’s open-source deep learning framework PaddlePaddle that has been used by more than 3.6 million developers around the world to build 400,000 AI models.

Baidu claims the models built using PaddlePaddle have led to applications to help water management systems run more efficiently, improve quality control in manufacturing, and even help athletes improve their training.

(Image Credit: Baidu)

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