Baidu has successfully activated a cluster of 30,000 self-developed third-generation P800 Kunlun chips, marking a significant advancement in the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.
CEO Robin Li made the announcement at the company’s annual developer conference, where Baidu provided updates on its ongoing AI initiatives. The P800 chip cluster is designed to support the training of DeepSeek-like models, capable of handling models with hundreds of billions of parameters or fine-tuning models for up to a thousand customers simultaneously.
Li also introduced Baidu’s latest AI model, Ernie 4.5 Turbo, which has demonstrated competitive performance across several benchmark tests, excelling in tasks such as coding and linguistic comprehension. Additionally, the company launched a new reasoning model, Ernie X1 Turbo, and announced plans to integrate AI capabilities into its various apps, including its cloud drive and content platform, Baidu Wenku.
Li emphasized the importance of applications, stating, “There are many AI models, but it’s apps that rule the world. Without apps, models and chips are worthless.”
The launch comes amid intense competition in China’s AI sector, as tech firms shift their focus from developing foundational models to finding practical applications that can drive user engagement. While Baidu was one of the first Chinese companies to heavily invest in AI after the 2022 debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, its Ernie Bot has faced challenges in gaining significant traction amid the growing competition.
