Baidu Announces Baidu Brain 7.0 AI Engine, Mass Production of the Kunlun II Coprocessor
Newly upgraded Baidu Brain, now in its seventh generation, boasts considerable improvements — while Kunlun II is three times faster.
Chinese technology giant Baidu has announced the release of Baidu Brain 7.0, the latest incarnation of its open platform for artificial intelligence — alongside mass production of its in-house Kunlun II AI processors.
"AI technology is growing increasingly complex," Haifeng Wang, Baidu's chief technology officer, told attendees of the company's Baidu World 2021 conference, "and integrated innovation has made AI more powerful."
That increase in power includes Baidu Brain 7.0, the latest incarnation of the company's open AI platform — one of the largest in the world, it claims. In its latest release, Baidu Brain is said to increase integration of a wider range of knowledge sources, improve language comprehension and reasoning capabilities, and offer outputs across a broader range of languages, voice, and visual formats.
The release of Baidu Brain 7.0 comes as the company, as is becoming increasingly common for those offering cloud-based AI services, announces mass production of its in-house accelerator chips: The Kunlun II AI Chip, which the company claims is two to three times more powerful than the original Kunlun.
Baidu isn't just positioning the Kunlun II accelerators for its cloud workloads, either: The company says the parts will also be applicable to everything from edge computing to high-performance computing for scientific research - and include support for a range of deep-learning frameworks, including he company's own open-source PaddlePaddle framework.
More information on the progression of Baidu Brain is available on the Baidu Research website.