Baidu has introduced AI-powered smart glasses as Chinese tech companies compete with international rivals to profit from AI-integrated gear.
At a Baidu event in Shanghai on Tuesday, Li Ying, the CEO of Baidu’s hardware brand Xiaodu, declared that the company’s smart glasses would “become a private assistant.”
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Key Insights:
According to the business, the glasses, powered by Baidu’s massive language model Ernie, would allow users to record movies, play music, ask questions about their surroundings, and check their caloric intake.
Experts say Chinese tech companies might take advantage of the nation’s advanced electronics industry to create competitive consumer hardware that incorporates AI, even though China is trailing behind the US in creating the most potent large language models. At first, only China will be able to purchase Baidu’s eyewear.
The company’s foray into the smart glasses industry coincides with US tech companies Meta and Snap vying for market dominance outside of China. A pair of the smart glasses that Meta and Ray-Ban have collaborated on can cost up to $379. China does not have them for sale.
Baidu’s smart glasses, which are anticipated to be available for purchase next year, mark the beginning of competition amongst the nation’s main internet companies to become the top supplier of gear with AI built in. In the past, start-ups were mostly responsible for the development of smart eyewear.
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Baidu V/S Others
Ernie Bot has been integrated into Xiaodu’s current products, such as a virtual dashboard that helps families keep an eye on older family members. These family members can communicate with AI doctors and get medicine reminders via a gadget.
ByteDance, the firm that owns TikTok, released its first set of earbuds last month that let users communicate with the Doubao chatbot directly without using a smartphone.
“Creating attractive consumer goods at competitive prices is the magic that Chinese tech companies have continuously demonstrated,” said Paul Triolo, partner and global digital policy head at consulting firm Albright Stonebridge Group. “They will have an advantage over international businesses in incorporating AI into practical applications on a large scale because of this.”
The battle to create China’s equivalent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT was being led by Baidu, the company that runs the nation’s most popular search engine. Since then, ByteDance’s Doubao has surpassed Ernie Bot, whose mobile version was recently relaunched as Wenxiaoyan.
Based on monthly active users, Doubao has emerged as China’s top chatbot, according to market research firm Sensor Tower. According to Sensor Tower, it was the fifth most downloaded AI app globally between January and August, after Google Gemini and ChatGPT.
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What Else?
Baidu CEO and co-founder Robin Li also unveiled iRAG, a new AI image generator, on Tuesday. According to Li, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), a method for increasing response accuracy with data retrieved from external sources, resulted in fewer hallucinations for the picture generator.
The chief executive of Baidu stated, “The biggest change in AI over the past year has been the elimination of hallucinations, using RAG to increase the reliability and accuracy of models.”
Baidu’s stock has dropped 26% since January as investors were unimpressed with its AI products and worried about declining ad revenues, although Tencent and Alibaba’s stocks have increased this year. Baidu’s search engine advertising accounts for the majority of its revenue.
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