Numerous eye-catching applications of artificial intelligence (AI), in industries such as manufacturing, intelligent cloud services, self-driving and astronomy, were on display at Baidu World Conference 2022 on Thursday.

Among them, cutting-edge products such as AI virtual beings and the world's first AI aerospace model, as well as a new autonomous vehicle (AV) without a steering wheel, attracted participants' attention.

The conference, co-hosted by China's leading internet and AI company Baidu Inc. and China Media Group (CMG), started at 9:00 a.m. online, under the theme of "Deepening AI innovation for social growth."

This year's conference aims to explore the possibilities of AI across various fields and showcase how it helps industrial upgrading and shapes the technological future.

New tech, products and applications

In order to unveil the advent of an era where "every human being will be able to possess a virtual counterpart," in other words, "mass production" of virtual beings, the conference took place on China's first metaverse platform Xi Rang. AI virtual digital host Xi Jiajia served as the AI planner, host and opening guest of the conference, together with another virtual host Du Xiaoxiao. 

The conference also released the latest developments in autonomous driving, AI Cloud, extended reality (XR), augmented reality (AR), large-scale AI models, innovative solutions and more. 

The world's first aerospace AI big model which aids the development of aerospace scientific research, the Wenxin Aerospace, is one of the showcased innovations. It is the world's first knowledge-enhanced 100-billion-scale pretrained language model, and the largest Chinese-language monolithic model with 260 billion parameters.

Moreover, participants also got to see a new kind of AV named Apollo RT6, with a detachable steering wheel, which will be used for robotaxi service in China next year. Cost per unit will drop to 250,000 yuan ( around $37,031) for the new model, compared with 480,000 yuan (around $70,944) for the previous generation, according to Baidu. 

"This massive cost reduction will enable us to deploy tens of thousands of AVs across China," Baidu's Chief Executive Robin Li said at the conference. "We are moving towards a future where taking a robotaxi will be half the cost of taking a taxi today."

The Baidu World Conference was first introduced in 2006, and the annual event has attracted tons of global participants from various industries relative to technology and innovation in the past 16 years.

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Live: Unveiling of cutting-edge technologies at Baidu World Conference 2022