2021 BRN Discussion, page-1791

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-12/tencent-baidu-fined-by-antitrust-regulator-for-previous-deals
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/baidu-ai-chip-unit-kunlun-043254378.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2021/03/15/china-poised-to-dominate-the-artificial-intelligence-ai-market/?sh=1045cf1b1b38
http://www.partnershiponai.org/
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/baidu-ai-chip-unit-kunlun-043254378.html
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Baidu's AI chip business Kunlun has raised an undisclosed amount of funding, valuing the unit at ~$2B. The financing round comes as Baidu weighs bringing its AI chip design to market and making Kunlun a standalone company.

More:

• Baidu announced Kunlun, a cloud-to-edge AI chip, in 2018. Baidu uses Kunlun chips in its cloud computing tech and electric vehicles.
• Last week, Baidu was among a dozen companies fined by China’s antitrust regulator for failing to properly report prior investment deals, which violated the country's anti-monopoly law.
• Reuters first reported on the latest funding, which was led by CITIC Private Equity Funds Management (CPE), a Chinese private equity firm. Other investors included IDG Capital, Legend Capital and, Oriza Hua.

Baidu's AI ambitions:

• In addition to Kunlun, Baidu offers a conversational AI platform called DuerOS for household devices. The search giant continues to incorporate AI technologies into nearly all of its businesses, including its search engine, drug discovery efforts, and self-driving vehicles through the Apollo open-source platform.
• Other AI offerings include a system that measures passengers’ temperatures at a Beijing railway station; its RNA prediction algorithm LinearFold; its PaddlePaddle deep-learning platform for industrial AI; and its ERNIE (Enhanced Representation through kNowledge Integration) language model.
• In 2018, it was the first Chinese company to join the Partnership on AI coalition supporting responsible AI uses. The group counts Google, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, DeepMind, Microsoft, and IBM among its founding members.

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