Baidu Introduces AI and Agent

Baidu, Inc., a leading AI company with a strong Internet foundation, unveiled its latest progress across its mobile ecosystem on Thursday, including Baidu Search, the ERNIE Bot App, the Baidu App, Baidu Wenku, among others – all strategically integrated with large language models (LLMs) and ERNIE agents. The announcements, made at the Wanxiang Conference 2024, an annual event for Baidu’s Mobile Ecosystem Group (MEG), mark the company’s latest commitment to lower the entry barrier for individuals and enterprises to fully harness the power of AI.

“Agent means productivity,” said Jackson He, Senior Corporate Vice President of Baidu and General Manager of MEG, in his keynote speech “Making agents accessible to everyone” at the conference. “[With agents], everyone can create and be equipped with superpowers.”

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Baidu’s Mobile Ecosystem offers a uniquely advantageous platform to develop and grow agents, enhancing content and services for hundreds of millions of users.

• Core services like Baidu Search are already AI-augmented, with 11% of search result pages filled with generated results. For creative needs such as presentation visuals, the Baidu AI Image Assistant can generate and even “edit” images simply by inputting text prompts.
• On Baidu App, users can now access the Interactive Channel, where they can engage in multi-turn dialogue, as well as tag specialized agents to address various issues.
• Baidu Wenku, an integrated platform for document archiving, content creation, and content sharing, has now evolved into an AI-assisted “one-stop shop” for content consumption and creation. With a collection of 1.2 billion high-quality document resources, Baidu Wenku provides over 100 multimodal AI features, which have been used more than 1.5 billion times by over 140 million users.
• Baidu Wenku also introduced Chengpian, a new AI application able to execute complex tasks, including professional knowledge retrieval and Q&A, extended image-text understanding and generation, in-depth article editing and organization, as well as cross-modal freestyle creation.
• ERNIE Bot App, Baidu’s generative AI app, now plays the role of a 24/7 online personal intelligent assistant, providing one-on-one assistance and meeting diverse needs.

For enterprise partners, agents offer the key to unlocking the vast potential of foundation models to enable intelligent transformation. Agents can help to solve many longstanding business operations needs, such as enhancing supply-demand matching and increasing operational efficiency.

In the e-commerce sector, Baidu Select, launched in May 2023, leverages advanced AI tools such as merchant knowledge graphs and ERNIE, to help merchant customers understand user needs and provide personalized shopping recommendations. The addition of Huiboxing, the industry’s first full-chain digital human livestream platform powered by AI, allows for the creation of 24/7 digital human streamers. This has helped e-tail customers boost sales performance with lower costs. Baidu Select has seen a 227% GMV increase for the Jan-May period year-on-year, with user transactions and active merchants rising by 283% and 242% respectively.

To help developers and individuals create agent effortlessly, Baidu’s AgentBuilder offers zero code and low code modes for agent development and deployment. It provides a full-chain solution from AI development to distribution and monetization. It supports natural language interaction and allows the creation of up to 50 agents on one account. Developers can also integrate customized plugins to realize specific functions, further simplifying the development process.

Today, AgentBuilder has served over 160,000 developers and users and more than 50,000 enterprises, covering over 100 application scenarios. The platform houses a diverse range of agents, from small-scale agents developed by individuals like copywriters, and corporate trainers, to bigger-scale agents developed by enterprises and organizations such as OPPO and the Singapore Tourism Board.

In developing the agent ecosystem, Baidu holds two key advantages, He explained at the event. The first is the company’s technological advantage in AI. Underpinning Baidu’s agents is the powerful ERNIE foundation model, China’s most advanced and widely applied foundation model, with industry-leading performance in understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory capabilities. The second advantage lies in Baidu’s massive user traffic. Baidu App has a monthly active user base of 676 million and is used by 9.7 million creators, making it a vibrant and vast ecosystem supported by the mutual interaction and growth of both creators and users.

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“This is an era where everyone has a chance to rise – everyone can participate and create,” He said. Noting that agent offers a strong new impetus for inclusivity in AI, he encouraged every individual to embrace agents to fully unleash their creative potential.