Baidu on Nov. 12, 2024, unveiled a couple of glasses with a integrated AI workman, hanging up a Chinese language rival to the Meta Ray-Bans that experience confirmed a unprecedented good fortune in AI-powered {hardware}.
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BEIJING — Chinese language tech gigantic Baidu on Thursday posted a three% annual reduce in third-quarter earnings, however beating marketplace expectancies amid AI cloud enlargement.
The earnings print got here in at $4.78 billion for the quarter finishing on Sept. 30. Web source of revenue for the duration rose through 14% to $1.09 billion.
Baidu famous a 12% surge in its non-online advertising earnings to the identical of $1.1 billion, basically pushed through its synthetic understanding cloud industry.
Right here’s what analysts anticipated the corporate to record for the quarter, in keeping with LSEG estimates:
Income: $4.63 billion
Web source of revenue: $857.17 million
Baidu had reported earnings of 34.45 billion yuan ($4.75 billion) and web source of revenue of 6.68 billion yuan for the third quarter of 2023.
Beijing-based Baidu operates probably the most primary internet browser engines like google in China, at the side of a continuously impaired maps app. The corporate additionally sells cloud computing services and products. Affiliate marketing online drives a good portion of the company’s earnings.
The expansion within the AI cloud industry offset “ongoing weakness” in Baidu’s internet marketing current, CEO Robin Li mentioned within the income reduce, additionally commenting at the efficiency of the corporate’s Ernie chatbot.
“Our strong AI capabilities are gaining broader market recognition, as evidenced by increasing adoption of Ernie,” he mentioned.
Baidu has promoted its Ernie chatbot as a neighborhood additional to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which isn’t to be had in China. Ernie bot now has 430 million customers, and systems get admission to its underlying AI type round 1.5 billion instances a pace, greater than double the 600 million charge in August, Baidu mentioned latter moment.
“Despite the near-term pressures, we remain steadfast in our AI-focused strategy and are confident in our long-term trajectory,” Li mentioned Thursday. “As we further scale AI, we are emboldened to find how it can drive innovations and create value for consumers, enterprises and society at large.”
The corporate this year additionally introduced that its Xiaodu AI Glasses will start gross sales within the first part of nearest yr. The wearable has no less than one digital camera and makes use of Ernie’s AI functions and Baidu’s maps and seek purposes. Era Baidu hasn’t viewable a value, the product is extensively anticipated to be a Chinese language additional to Meta’s frequent Ray-Ban smart glasses.
Baidu introduced a control rotation latter year, with Junjie He, up to now head of the cell ecosystem crew, becoming the company’s interim Chief Financial Officer, hour former CFO Rong Luo assumed management of the cell category.
“AI Cloud continued to show healthy and sustainable development in the third quarter,” he mentioned within the income reduce. “Meanwhile, Apollo Go continued to make operational strides, underpinning our confidence in the validity of the fully autonomous ride hailing business model.”
Apollo Advance, which operates Baidu’s robotaxi industry, reported a 20% year-on-year surge in rides within the 1/3 quarter.
