Wang Haifeng said: "The year 2020 of the world is a year of change full of uncertainty; China's year of 2020 is a year in which we hope to unite, overcome difficulties and create a new bureau in the changing situation; Baidu AI's year of 2020 is a year of hard work, with firm belief, embracing change and practicing "better technology".
Looking back on 2020, in the fight against the epidemic, Baidu AI contributed the temperature and strength of science and technology for the first time to fight the epidemic and protect life safety; In the resumption of production and high-quality development, Baidu AI is a new kinetic energy to promote innovation and build a new pattern; In our work and life, Baidu AI is in every piece of information and knowledge you search, in the voice of map navigation, in the simultaneous subtitles of international conferences, in the unmanned quality inspection equipment of factories, and in the continuous expansion of self-driving taxis ... Baidu AI is around us, making our work more efficient and our life more convenient.
In 2020, Baidu AI will continue its own characteristic road in the year of hard work: continuous innovation and breakthrough, exploring the frontier of science and technology; Self-controllable, open source and open, consolidate the soft and hard integrated AI production platform, and create a new AI infrastructure; The integration of cloud and intelligence can empower the industry, empower the ecology and accelerate the intelligence of the industry. "
Some key figures can give a glimpse of Baidu AI's achievements: Baidu AI has won more than 30 championships and more than 260 papers in the world's top artificial intelligence academic conferences and authoritative competitions such as CVPR, ACL, ECCV, NeurIPS, and INTERSPEECH, continuously demonstrating the leading strength of AI technology; In terms of the number of artificial intelligence patent applications and authorizations, Baidu ranks first in China with 9,364 patent applications and 2,682 patent authorizations; This year, Baidu was once again selected as one of the "50 Smart Companies" in MIT Science and Technology Review; Up to now, Baidu * * * has won more than 100 awards from the government, industry associations, media and other institutions, such as the Searle Award, the highest award of the 2020 World Artificial Intelligence Conference.
In addition to these most direct figures, Baidu AI 2020 also comprehensively demonstrated its progress and achievements in AI emerging infrastructure, industrial intelligence, AI serving society, and personnel training.
New infrastructure of artificial intelligence
In 2020, Baidu AI's four silhouettes depict that AI has entered industrial production and become a solid AI infrastructure.
The first silhouette is the independent innovation of core technology outlined by Baidu Brain 6.0. In 2020, Baidu's brain core technology broke through "knowledge-enhanced cross-modal deep semantic understanding" to understand complex scenes in the real world. On the other hand, Baidu's brain "soft and hard integrated AI production platform" has been upgraded to a brand-new AI infrastructure, which supports AI industrial production more efficiently and helps accelerate the intelligent development of the industry.
The second silhouette, Baidu Feipaddle continues to innovate, and the prosperous open source ecology supports industrial development. Flying oar is the first open source, fully functional and self-controllable industrial deep learning platform in China. V2.0RC version of propeller flight open source framework brings a brand-new development experience of "consistent programming, dynamic and static unification". There are 20 hardware eco-partners and 29 chip /IP models that are adapted or being adapted, which provide a solid foundation for independent control and accelerate the ecological construction of the AI industry. Flying Paddle has gathered more than 2.65 million developers, trained 340,000 models and served 654.38 million enterprises.
The third silhouette is a blueprint for the future depicted by cutting-edge technology. Baidu released Quantum Leaf, the first cloud native quantum computing platform in China, and provided quantum development kits such as QCompute to shorten the whole life cycle of quantum programming and realize the closed loop of quantum tool chain. Baidu Hyperlink has 425 technical patents, such as in-chain parallel technology and stereoscopic network, realizing the industry-leading network performance of 87,000 TPS for single chain, and donated it to the Open Atomic Open Source Foundation as the first project in China. Baidu artificial intelligence also combines biological computing and virus research. Baidu has opened the Linearfold time algorithm, which can shorten the prediction of the secondary structure of the virus genome from 55 minutes to 27 seconds, and increase the speed by 120 times. In addition, LinearDesign, the world's first mRNA vaccine gene sequence design algorithm launched by Baidu, can greatly improve the stability of vaccine design and protein expression level within 16 minutes, thus effectively solving the most important stability problem in mRNA vaccine research and development and accelerating vaccine research and development.
The fourth silhouette is the intelligent economic "highway" paved by cloud computing. This year, Baidu AI Cloud is the first in the industry to propose the AI native cloud computing architecture, release a new generation of infrastructure Baidu Taihang, and independently develop the cloud native database product Baidu AI Cloud Gaia to support the intelligent application of the industry conveniently and efficiently. In addition, ABC Stack, a hybrid/proprietary cloud platform, fully supports domestic servers and operating systems. The industrial version and enterprise version of ABC Stack focus on Baidu's self-developed Kunlun AI chip to realize a real domestic intelligent cloud.
The four "silhouettes" overlap, and the "Baidu AI New Infrastructure Atlas" gradually becomes clear. Baidu is relying on the new AI infrastructure, including Baidu brain, propeller, intelligent cloud and data center, to promote the upgrading of intelligent industry in the fields of intelligent transportation, smart city, smart finance, smart energy, smart medical care, industrial internet and intelligent manufacturing.
AI depicts "all things intelligence", and industrial intelligence is surging.
The COVID-19 epidemic has brought great impact to the global economy, and also made all sectors of society fully realize the important value of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. On the one hand, Baidu AI serves the public through search, maps, input methods, products and platforms such as Xiaodi and Apollo, making life easier and more convenient; On the other hand, through Baidu AI Cloud, an important carrier and exporter of Baidu AI to B, Baidu's AI technology achievements and platform capabilities are transported to all walks of life on a large scale, supporting the intelligent upgrading of industries and accelerating the arrival of intelligent economy.
Baidu AI helps to continuously optimize the search experience and better connect information and services. Baidu mobile ecology is the leading mobile ecology with information and knowledge as the core in China. With the blessing of AI technology, Baijiahao, smart applet and hosting page have rapidly developed into the leading content and service access platform in China. Based on natural language processing, knowledge map, voice, vision, deep learning and other AI technical capabilities, Baidu search is also continuing to be intelligent.
A new generation of artificial intelligence map-Baidu map makes travel easier. In 2020, Baidu Map insisted on upgrading its travel service with the advantages and innovative ability of AI, and became an authoritative travel platform trusted by the people, including familiar navigation mode, lane-level navigation function, AI indoor communication, traffic light countdown and so on. At present, more than 90% of the data production links of Baidu map are oriented to AI, and the panoramic map covers more than 95% of the cities in the country, covering more than 3 million kilometers; The voice interaction scene has also achieved rapid growth, and the number of users of Baidu Map Intelligent Voice Assistant has exceeded 400 million.
Baidu map ai indoor communication
AI fully empowers the input method, and its market share and active users have leapt to the leading position in the industry. Baidu's input method market share and monthly active users have grown rapidly, and the current monthly activity exceeds 600 million; A number of AI functions have made major breakthroughs in the industry, among which the voice input ability has continued to break through, and it has become the first input method product in the industry with an average daily voice request of 65.438 billion times. The accuracy of speech recognition reached 98.6%, and the offline Chinese-English free speech upgrade was realized. Baidu input method has become the third-party mobile phone input method with the highest voice input penetration rate. With the continuous upgrading of handwriting input, the accuracy of handwriting recognition has increased to 96%.
A small degree of "breaking the circle" broadens the application boundary of intelligent assistants. This year, Xiao Di released the infrared Mini smart speaker 2 equipped with Baidu Honghu chip, Mini education smart screen and Mini early education machine focusing on online children's education, Mini smart screen Air, the first new mini wireless smart headset for portable scenes, and mini smart screen X 10 to meet the needs of every family member, which made Xiao Di "break the circle" and accelerate in more scenes and crowds.
Apollo has more than ten autonomous driving projects, ranking first in China and leading the industry in technical strength. Baidu Apollo constantly refreshes the "high difficulty" in the field of smart travel. At the "Everything Intelligence-Baidu World 2020" conference, Baidu completed the world's first fully unmanned live broadcast, that is, the artificial intelligence system drove independently without a safe driver in the car. Baidu has opened radish run go on road trip service in Changsha, Zhangzhou and Beijing. Apollo, a smart car product, has entered a million smart cars. Baidu released the first full-stack intelligent transportation solution "ACE Traffic Engine" at home and abroad, which is rooted in the new intelligent transportation infrastructure in China. At present, it has obtained orders for new intelligent transportation infrastructure in nearly 20 cities.
Strong "smart" Lingyun, Baidu AI Cloud accelerates industrial intelligence. In 2020, under the background of epidemic situation and changes in global economic situation, it is very important to promote industrial development with scientific and technological innovation and improve the efficiency and core competitiveness of economic quality. Baidu AI Cloud integrates Baidu's core technologies such as cloud computing, Baidu brain and big data, and releases a brand-new strategy of "focusing on important tracks based on cloud computing and focusing on AI", which promotes the intelligent development of the industry and becomes the key force to accelerate the industrialization of AI in the tide of new infrastructure.
Baidu smart city solutions have been applied in Beijing Haidian, Chongqing, Chengdu, Suzhou, Ningbo, Lijiang and other 10+ provinces and cities; Smart financial services have served nearly 200 financial customers and built more than 30 partner ecosystems, ranking first in the field of domestic financial cloud solutions; Baidu Smart Medical has served more than 300 hospitals, 1500 primary medical institutions, assisted tens of thousands of doctors, and benefited more than10 million patients; Intelligent manufacturing covers 14 major industries, 100 enterprises and more than 30 partners, reaching more than 50 types of vertical scenarios, and has reached a large scale in 3C, automobile, steel, energy and other industries; Baidu Smart Energy has covered power grid, power generation, new energy, clean energy, petroleum, chemical industry and other scenarios, and joined hands with State Grid and China Southern Power Grid for intelligent upgrade; Release the enterprise intelligence application "Baidu Liu Ru", build an office assembly line in the AI era, and build a new generation of intelligent work platform.
Serve the society and cultivate talents
There is no winter that can't pass, and there is no spring that can't come. In 2020, in the face of a sudden epidemic, Baidu AI joined the battle for epidemic prevention for the first time. Baidu AI appeared in China CDC, and 10 hour helped complete the whole genome sequencing of four cases in Beijing; Appear in public places such as subway and high-speed rail to solve the problem of temperature detection under the condition of wearing masks and hats; For the follow-up calls at the grassroots level, the intelligent outbound platform calls out 1500 calls a second to assist in the investigation and notification, so that grassroots prevention and control personnel have time to sit down and have a hot meal; AI consultation calls nearly 10,000 times a day, and robot epidemic prevention solutions have landed in more than 30 hospitals and institutions. Baidu map migration big data platform and real-time traffic platform provide reference for national prevention and control deployment, and functions such as fever clinic map, epidemic community map, and nucleic acid detection agency query help fight epidemic prevention faster and more conveniently from different angles.
Baidu adheres to the concept of "better technology" and practices the social responsibility of corporate citizens. Baidu first used artificial intelligence technology to find people. By the end of 2020, 65438+February, Baidu AI had helped nearly 12000 families reunite. Baidu AI continues to support cultural protection and animal protection. For example, Baidu cooperated with IFAW of the International Animal Welfare Foundation to launch the world's first platform to use artificial intelligence technology to combat illegal trade in wildlife products.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence and the wave of industrial intelligence have aggravated the global shortage of AI talents. For colleges and universities, Baidu provides a full set of teaching resource packages, training platforms and 100 million yuan of computing power support to build a curriculum system with colleges and universities; At present, the training course for college teachers 13 has been held, training more than 800 AI teachers/KLOC-0, and supporting more than 200 colleges and universities to offer AI credit courses. Not long ago, Baidu Feipaddle's "Great Navigation" plan was announced, and its "Sailing" part was aimed at AI talent training in colleges and universities: in the next three years, Baidu Feipaddle will invest a total of 500 million yuan in funds and resources to support 500 colleges and universities nationwide, focusing on training 5,000 AI teachers in colleges and universities, and jointly training 500,000 AI future talents with colleges and universities.
Future-oriented
In 2020, the world pattern is constantly changing. As Wang Haifeng, CTO of Baidu, said: "Based on the new stage of development and building a new pattern with new ideas, scientific and technological innovation is the key. Baidu AI's 2020 is advancing with the times. "