Qualcomm, Baidu Put Their Artificial Intelligence Heads Together

“The companies will combine their technologies through the Open Neural Network Exchange (“ONNX”), an open source platform aimed at allowing developers to easily choose between a number of different tools and models as they build AI technologies.”

Qualcomm and Baidu are deepening their partnership on Artificial Intelligence, announcing that they will essentially combine their Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence and Baidu PaddlePaddle platforms.

The latter was first launched as a deep learning platform for internal use at Baidu in 2013, with the company subsequently making it open source in August of 2016. And with Baidu’s announcement in February of this year that it would support the Qualcomm AI Engine, bringing Baidu PaddlePaddle into the mix appears to be a logical next step.

The companies will combine their technologies through the Open Neural Network Exchange (“ONNX”), an open source platform aimed at allowing developers to easily choose between a number of different tools and models as they build AI technologies. Other partners of the ONNX include Microsoft, Facebook, NVIDIA, and Amazon Web Services.

In a statement announcing the collaboration, Qualcomm and Baidu said they would use the Qualcomm AI Engine “to drive conversion and application” of Baidu PaddlePaddle models on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips, with the aim of delivering enhanced on-device AI systems to mobile devices using those chips. The partnership was announced in the same week that Qualcomm launched a new R&D united dedicated to AI, further underlining the company’s increasingly intense focus on this area.