With the development of Beijing, Baidu can now operate a driverless taxi service in three Chinese cities, including Wuhan and Chongqing.
Chinese tech giant Baidu has secured the right to offer the first fully driverless taxi service in China’s capital Beijing. On Friday, the Beijing-based company made the announcement, which also included part of its logistics rollout. Baidu said its Apollo Go service would deploy 10 fully autonomous cars at a technology park developed by the Beijing government.
Currently, Apollo Go has vehicles making more than 20 trips per day in the Yizhuang Economic Development Zone. The Yizhuang Economic Development Zone is one of the cradles of autonomous driving in China.
In the fourth quarter of last year, Apollo Go completed 561,000 trips, representing a year-over-year increase of 162%. In addition, the accumulated number of trips made by the platform exceeded two million at the end of January. This development makes Baidu the world’s largest autonomous transportation service provider. This year, the Chinese tech powerhouse is also looking to establish the world’s largest driverless passenger transport area.
Baidu’s driverless taxi permit in Beijing marks a significant step forward since last December. At the time, Baidu received a permit to test the service as the company sought to diversify beyond its basic Internet search engine service. The Chinese multinational tech company has been focusing on autonomous driving technologies for the past five years.
Baidu Wuhan Driverless Taxi Expanded Operability
At the end of December, Baidu began offering autonomous night taxis in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The scheme was a step up from the daytime operations the company previously operated in the city. Baidu explained that the stand-alone service, which runs from 7 am to 11 pm, will cover around one million customers.
In an earlier statement, Baidu also referred to its autonomous vehicle visual language model for identifying invisible objects in long-tail scenarios. According For the technological giant, “the model will allow autonomous vehicles to quickly make sense of an invisible object, such as the recognition of special vehicles (fire truck, ambulance), the erroneous detection of plastic bags and others. In addition, Baidu’s autonomous driving perception model, a sub-model of WenXin’s Grand Model, leveraging more than a billion parameters, can dramatically improve the generalizability potential of autonomous driving perception.”
As it stands, Baidu will operate driverless robotaxi services in three Chinese cities: Beijing, Wuhan and Chongqing.
ChatGPT Rival
In other recent Baidu news, the company’s shares fell 6% after CEO Robin Li revealed an AI chatbot that rivals ChatGPT. Most of the negative reaction was channeled into the ‘pre-recorded’ presentation format of the opening.
Li touted the benefits of the Chinese-language ChatGPT initiative. According to him, “his very high ability to understand and express language will allow any company to get closer to its customers. It is an opportunity for all companies, and it will even have an impact on each person”.
Despite admitting to some inherent bugs in the technology’s current functionality, the Baidu CEO noted that the AI bot is “moving very fast.”
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Tolu is a Lagos-based blockchain and cryptocurrency enthusiast. He likes to demystify the crypto stories down to the basics so that anyone anywhere can understand them without too much prior knowledge. When he’s not up to his neck in crypto-stories, Tolu likes music, loves to sing, and is an avid movie buff.
