Nvidia and Baidu team up for AI

Artificial intelligence has some new takers as Nvidia and Baidu announce their agreement to work together to develop AI for self-driving cars. The Chinese search giant Baidu has been developing self driving car platform and calls it ‘Apollo’. Recently, it has announced that nearly 50 big shot companies have joined to work on Apollo. Nvidia being one of them.  

They plan to work together on cloud computing, autonomous driving, education and research, and certain domestic uses via consumer devices. This may actually be Nvidia’s big boost for its GPU business in the years to come. This new partnership will actually include Nvidia’s Volta GPUs in the Baidu Cloud. In addition to this, it will also have an adoption of Drive PX for Baidu’s self-driving cars. Baidu’s PaddlePaddle open source deep learning framework will have optimizations from Nvidia Volta.  This will eventually be broadly accessible to researchers and academic institutions.

Speaking of the project Apollo, Baidu announced earlier this year that it will be hitting in the roads by 2020. With this ambitious project, Baidu is aiming for competition from the Western tech companies like Ford, BMW, GM, Waymo and many others, who are also intensely working on self-driving cars. The collaboration between Baidu and 50 other companies is making sure that it has a strong hold in the market.

Luckily for Nvidia, this collaboration could be a big win-win situation. This could be one of the most important partnerships in AI computing. Although these two companies have worked together before, this could be a platform to broaden their relations.

“Apollo is solely not Baidu’s. It belongs to everyone in the ecosystem. And we and our partners contribute to the platform in our areas of specialty, we all gain more, with results far greater than just our own”, said the COO of Baidu, Qi Lu.