Baidu’s artificial intelligence is powered by open source technologies like Kubernetes

Baidu, one of the trinities of Chinese giants commonly known as BAT (Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent), has joined the home of Kubernetes, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), as a Gold Member.

“CNCF membership is a way for us to directly invest in many of the most cutting-edge, promising cloud native technologies to fuel richer, faster deep learning market growth,” said Watson Yin, Vice President of Baidu.

Baidu is one of the major powers in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) space, using methods including deep learning to develop new AI-enabled initiatives in areas such as autonomous driving, conversational AI, financial services and the cloud.

And Open source technologies like Kubernetes play a big role in Baidu’s artificial intellegecny capabilities. “Baidu believes cloud native technologies are critical to accelerating machine learning. CNCF membership is a way for us to directly invest in many of the most cutting-edge, promising cloud native technologies to fuel richer, faster deep learning market growth,” added Yin.

Like any major playes, Baidu is not only consuming open source, it’s also contributing to it. Last year, Baidu open sourced its deep learning framework, PaddlePaddle, as part of its continued commitment to open source.

This year PaddlePaddle achieved compatibbility with Kubernetes, making it one of the first machine learning tools that supports Kubernetes. It’s a collaborative effort of companies like CoreOS and other open source communities who are working with Baidu to further ‘smarten’ PaddlePaddle and fine-tune it for Kubernetes.

As one of the BAT companies, Baidu leverages its position at the intersection of big data, technology and search to accelerate the commercialization and application of AI technologies. The company is taking AI to the next stage through its technology and research into areas such as image recognition, speech recognition, natural language processing, and user profiling.