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Baidu Unveils iRAG and No-Code Tool Miaoda to Drive AI Application Boom

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–       The new iRAG technology mitigates hallucinations in image generation, boosting the applicability of AI-generated images.
–       Miaoda is a no-code tool that enables users to build applications using simple natural language.
–       ERNIE now handles 1.5 billion daily API calls, marking an exceptional 30-fold growth over the previous year.

SHANGHAI, Nov. 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Baidu, Inc. (NASDAQ: BIDU and HKEX: 9888), a leading AI company with strong Internet foundation, today hosted its annual flagship technology conference Baidu World 2024 in Shanghai. At the event, the company announced a range of new AI technologies and solutions to accelerate the boom of AI applications, featuring iRAG (Image-Based Retrieval-Augmented Generation), a new technology designed to tackle hallucinations in image generation, and Miaoda, a no-code tool that empowers businesses and individuals to create applications.

The launch comes amid surging demand for Baidu’s AI offerings, as evidenced by the ERNIE foundation model’s daily API calls reaching 1.5 billion by early November. This represents a substantial 30-fold increase from the 50 million announced a year ago.

“The growth rate exceeded my expectations,” said Robin Li, Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Baidu, who described the steep increase as a reflection of the explosive growth in generative AI applications in China over the past two years.

Looking ahead, Li emphasized that agents will serve as the predominant form of AI applications and are approaching a tipping point of explosive growth. Underscoring this point, Li introduced the Top 100 Agents and Top 100 Industry Applications on the ERNIE AgentBuilder platform.

Baidu World 2024 also highlighted the latest user growth for ERNIE Bot, ERNIE’s expanding role in enterprise applications, and featured the debut of Xiaodu AI Glasses by Xiaodu Technology.

New iRAG Technology to Mitigate Hallucinations in Image Generation

Hallucinations, a phenomenon in which AI generates false or misleading information, have remained one of the most intractable barriers to the widespread adoption of generative AI. In text generation, RAG technology has largely resolved the problem of hallucinations, greatly enhancing the accuracy of generated answers. However, in the field of multimodality, hallucinations remain a key obstacle, often manifesting as inaccurate depictions of people or landmarks.

Baidu’s newly launched iRAG technology can mitigate hallucinations in text-to-image generation. Leveraging Baidu Search’s vast collection of hundreds of millions of images and the company’s strong foundation model capabilities, the new technology enables text-to-image models to deliver hyper-realistic visuals while also significantly reducing the cost of image production. The ability of the iRAG to reduce hallucinations boosts the applicability of images generated by text-to-image models across visual mediums, including comics, storyboards, posters, among others. Li described the reduction of hallucinations as laying the groundwork for the coming boom in AI applications.

Miaoda: Building Applications with Natural Language

Baidu also unveiled Miaoda, a no-code tool that makes it possible to build entire applications simply by describing them in natural language. Miaoda provides no-code programming, multi-agent collaboration, and multi-tool invocation. No-code programming allows anyone to generate code without writing a single line, lowering barriers to AI development and making it accessible to all. Its multi-agent collaboration leverages ERNIE’s thinking and planning capabilities to coordinate and manage different agents effectively, while its multi-tool invocation taps into ERNIE’s tool invocation abilities, extensively utilizing web search, iRAG, maps API, and other tools for a seamless workflow.

“Baidu isn’t aiming to launch a ‘super app’; instead, we aim to help more people and businesses create millions of ‘super useful’ applications,” Li said.

Mirroring the real-world product development process, Miaoda draws on the abilities of different agents across multiple domains such as project management and planning, content editing, programming and quality control. Miaoda can even automatically identify bugs and use a range of tools. Li called it “the most complex application case of multi-agent collaboration to date”.

Miaoda empowers everyone with the capabilities of a programmer – anyone who can speak, can create applications, greatly enhancing human productivity.

Agents as the Next Frontier in AI Application 

“Today, while all leading global tech firms are paying attention to agents, few have made them as central to their strategy as Baidu has,” Li said at the event. He likened the potential of agents to websites in the PC era and social media accounts in the mobile age.

“Agents are more human-like, more intelligent, and act like your sales, customer service representatives, or assistants. Agents will become a new vehicle for content, information and services,” Li added.

Four types of agents – company, character, tool, and industry – were highlighted at the event to demonstrate the potential of agents in the AI era. Company agents, for example, differ from traditional websites that only show static company and product information, and can instead proactively recommend products based on customer needs and respond promptly to service requests, greatly improving the efficiency of interactive marketing. After deploying an agent powered by ERNIE, automaker BYD saw a 119% increase in lead conversion.

Li also offered the example of the tool agent Free Canvas, developed in collaboration between Baidu Wenku and Baidu Drive. It allows users to drag and drop documents, audio, video, and other materials onto a canvas-like interface to quickly generate multimodal content. Similarly, the industry agent Faxingbao was specifically developed for the legal field. It has answered over 16.6 million legal questions and can also calculate compensation, draft legal documents, and recommend suitable lawyers.

To date, Baidu’s ERNIE AgentBuilder has garnered the interest of 150,000 businesses and 800,000 developers. The top 100 agents encompass character-based agents like the “Farmer Academician”, as well as agents for tools, industries, workplace, emotions, and entertainment.

Expanding ERNIE’s Reach with Growing Developer Community, Enterprise Applications and AI Glasses

Haifeng Wang, Chief Technology Officer of Baidu, announced that ERNIE Bot has amassed 430 million users, while the PaddlePaddle deep learning platform and ERNIE have a total of 18.08 million developers. Wang also mentioned that the ERNIE foundation model is still in training, with an even more powerful version worth looking forward to.

Dou Shen, Executive Vice President of Baidu and President of Baidu AI Cloud Group, highlighted that the Qianfan platform has helped customers fine-tune 33,000 models, and develop 770,000 enterprise applications. Shen noted that the explosion in new AI applications has begun on the enterprise front, supported by a new AI infrastructure comprising an enterprise-level foundation model engineering platform and a heterogeneous computing platform, poised to replace traditional cloud computing.

Ying Li, CEO of Xiaodu Technology, introduced Xiaodu AI Glasses, the first native AI glasses powered by a Chinese language foundation model. Powered by ERNIE and equipped with visual, audio, and location-based capabilities, these smart glasses serve as a versatile AI assistant across everyday scenarios. They function as a personal tour guide, offer information via Baidu Maps and Search, and excel in instant translation and content summarization from photos. Ideal for both academics and casual readers, they also assist with intelligent note-taking and can personalize music to enhance the user’s surroundings. Li revealed that Xiaodu AI Glasses will be available for sale in the first half of 2025.

About Baidu

Founded in 2000, Baidu’s mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Baidu is a leading AI company with strong internet foundation, trading on the NASDAQ under “BIDU” and HKEX under “9888.” One Baidu ADS represents eight Class A ordinary shares.

Media Contact
intlcomm@baidu.com

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SOURCE Baidu, Inc.

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Huawei Cloud in France: Building an AI-Native Cloud to Amplify Intelligence on the Tech Stage

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PARIS, Nov. 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — HUAWEI CONNECT 2024 PARIS commenced today, featuring the first Huawei Cloud Summit France. Huawei Cloud is building an AI-native cloud through systematic innovation and service reshaping. Moving forward, Huawei Cloud will continue to drive innovation in both the “AI for Cloud” and “Cloud for AI” directions, accelerating the intelligent transformation across industries in France.

Jacqueline Shi, President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service, delivered a welcome speech in her digital presence built using Huawei Cloud MetaStudio. She stated, “Innovation is the heart of our success, our competitiveness, and our growth. That’s why we invest heavily in R&D to bring you the most secure and reliable cloud services possible, including cloud native, AI, and big data. In Europe, Huawei Cloud has collaborated with over 500 local partners to deliver a wide range of industry-specific solutions and proven expertise, enabling European businesses to expedite their cloud adoption, leverage global resources, and achieve leapfrog growth.”

In his keynote speech, William Dong, President of Huawei Cloud Marketing, highlighted the importance of AI in building economic moats. To this end, Huawei Cloud launches Pangu models to enable intelligent upgrades across industries, with over 400 use cases in 30 industries now benefiting from Huawei Cloud’s AI-native cloud infrastructure that extends cutting-edge technologies and premium experiences to European customers. On the tech stage, Huawei Cloud is set to amplify intelligence.

Huawei Cloud’s AI-native strategy has been a cornerstone of the company’s innovation. This strategy is twofold: AI for Cloud and Cloud for AI, marking significant advancements in Huawei Cloud’s capabilities. “AI for Cloud” means integrating Pangu models with cloud services for product R&D, data governance, security, and O&M to make them more intelligent and efficient.

With full-stack systemic innovations, “Cloud for AI” covers data centers, cloud platform architectures, and infrastructure services, enabling efficient and high-performance data preparation, training, inference, and application of foundation models. The distributed cloud database GaussDB features high performance, high intelligence, and easy migration. Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5 provides more than 120 locally deployed cloud services and 50 industry-specific solutions, building the optimal hybrid cloud for intelligent transformation.

At this summit, Huawei Cloud officially released the Flexus cloud services for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in France. Flexus feature flexible specifications, AI-driven high speed, 6x burst speed, compute hot upgrade, and ultimate experience.

Presently, Huawei Cloud has more than 500 customers, partners, and developers in France. Song Wanying, President of Huawei Cloud France, shared insights on fostering business growth through cloud innovation and introduced new media & entertainment, e-commerce, and retail solutions for the French market, furthering intelligent initiatives.

Huawei Cloud has upgraded media services in a 3E approach: efficiency, experience, and evolution. For instance, AIGC for virtual humans can significantly reduce the time required for short video production from days to mere minutes. In terms of experience, Huawei Cloud leverages its self-developed RTP protocol to minimize latency to 500 ms and reduce frame freezing to 10%. For business model evolution, Huawei Cloud offers virtual human technology to facilitate efficient video production, leading to new business opportunities and growth.

In retail and e-commerce, Huawei Cloud has developed the B.R.A.N.D. model to assist retailers in driving innovation and growth. Through professional services, deterministic operations, security, reliability, and 16 sub-scenario solutions, B.R.A.N.D. enables retailers to build agile, efficient, and secure business systems.

In terms of ecosystem expansion, Huawei Cloud has partnered with Station F, the world’s largest startup incubator, to launch a sustainability-themed incubation program. This program aims to provide comprehensive support for startups, including cloud resources, investment opportunities, and dedicated office spaces. Additionally, Huawei Cloud and 20 ecosystem partners have unveiled the Industry Partner Innovation Program at the summit.

This two-day event features a packed agenda, including the partner forum and the Cloud Native Elite Club (CNEC) roundtable. At this year’s HUAWEI CONNECT Europe, CNEC returned to Europe and invited its first members to join this technical community built for European technology pioneers.

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ALBERT GAHFI, NEWCO CAPITAL GROUP CEO, NOMINATED FOR THE U.S. FINTECH AWARDS’ INNOVATOR OF THE YEAR

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NEW YORK, Nov. 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — NewCo Capital Group is proud to announce that Albert Gahfi, CEO of NewCo Capital Group and Co-Founder and Director of Bizcap, has been nominated for the prestigious Innovator of the Year Award by the U.S. FinTech Awards. This recognition highlights Albert’s groundbreaking contributions to the FinTech sector and his dedication to founding companies that empower small businesses with forward-thinking capital solutions.

We are focused on what’s next—continuing to build the tools and services that will drive the future of FinTech

As a proven enterprise-building founder and CEO, Albert co-founded Kings Cash Group and oversaw its merger with a large FinTech consortium that included an SEC-registered fund. As the Co-Founder and CEO of NewCo Capital Group, Capytal.com, and NewCo Canada, as well as the co-founder of Melbourne-based BizCap, Albert’s global expansion strategy has led to the opening of offices in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and a recently announced strategic initiative in Asia via Singapore.

The nomination for Innovator of the Year underscores NewCo’s commitment to reshaping how small-to-medium businesses and enterprise companies access financing. Since its founding, NewCo has remained at the forefront of Specialty Finance within the FinTech sector, continually creating custom capital solutions that leverage advanced technology, nuanced underwriting, and a deep understanding of client needs.

Bruce Gurvitsch, Chief Revenue Officer for NewCo Capital Group and Capytal.com, commended the nomination, stating, “Albert’s nomination for Innovator of the Year reflects his unwavering pursuit of excellence—a drive that defines our mission at NewCo. We’re committed to pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in FinTech, ensuring that SMBs have access to the capital they need for growth, job creation, and long-term success.”

NewCo and its affiliate companies have transformed traditional financing models, making it easier, faster, and more efficient for businesses to secure funding. With over $1.8 billion deployed across 40,000+ businesses globally, NewCo continues to lead the charge in specialized financing and working capital.

Reflecting on the nomination, Gahfi remarked, ‘This recognition from the U.S. FinTech Awards validates our efforts and inspires us to continue delivering the most innovative solutions to the market.’ He emphasized NewCo’s long-term vision, adding, ‘We are focused on what’s next—continuing to build the tools and services that will drive the future of FinTech. Our mission has always been to empower small businesses globally.’

For more information about NewCo Capital Group, visit www.NewCoCapitalGroup.com or email Info@NewCoCapitalGroup.com.

About NewCo Capital Group & Capytal.com

Founded in 2020, NewCo Capital Group and its affiliate companies empower SMBs globally with fast, accessible financing and funding. The companies have successfully deployed $1.8 billion to over 40,000 SMBs while maintaining a 4.9/5 Trustpilot rating.

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SOURCE NewCo Capital Group

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Enrollsy Unveils Brand Refresh and New Website to Enhance Enrollment Experience for Schools, Camps, Nonprofits, and More

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LEHI, Utah, Nov. 14, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Enrollsy, the platform dedicated to making enrollment simple and accessible for organizations of all sizes, is thrilled to announce its brand refresh and launch of a new website at www.enrollsy.com. With a renewed focus on simplifying enrollment processes and delivering unparalleled support, Enrollsy’s brand refresh reinforces its commitment to empowering non-technical professionals with a seamless, user-friendly experience.

Enrollsy is online enrollment software made easy.

The name “Enrollsy” reflects the platform’s mission: combining “enroll” and “easy” to describe a solution that effortlessly manages the enrollment process—from sign-up to payments and communications—without requiring technical expertise or IT support. Enrollsy’s customizable platform is designed to solve enrollment challenges and make life easier for administrators everywhere.

Empowering Purpose, Mission, Vision, and Values

Driven by a purpose to create an exceptional experience from the first interaction to ongoing support, Enrollsy ensures every aspect of its service is tailored to customer needs. Enrollsy’s mission—to provide an amazing enrollment experience to 10 million people in a single year—drives the platform to innovate, simplify, and perfect enrollment solutions for organizations managing data, payments, and communications.

Enrollsy envisions a world where education, enrichment, and connection drive better outcomes, helping organizations fulfill their missions. As a trusted partner, Enrollsy shares its values with customers by prioritizing consistency, honoring commitments, and maintaining clear, actionable communication.

Unmatched Customer Experiences

Enrollsy’s brand refresh also highlights its commitment to delivering value through real-life customer success stories. Elizabeth Fizer, owner of Fizer Fine Art, shares, “Enrollsy transformed our registration process from an absolute nightmare to easily manageable. Their unmatched customer service and ability to tailor the software to meet our specific needs allowed us to offer flexible schedules and simplified invoicing—enabling me to focus on my family during a busy registration period. Parents found it easy and intuitive, which only enhanced our customer experience.”

Similarly, Matthew Vinson from Common Ground on the Hill, a nonprofit, noted, “Enrollsy exceeded our expectations by listening to our unique needs and creating a system that integrates with our existing applications seamlessly. They understood our operations and provided features we needed, making the registration process efficient and stress-free.”

Visit the New Enrollsy Website

Enrollsy’s reimagined website offers a refreshed look at how the platform simplifies enrollment, billing, and communication for education, enrichment, and nonprofit organizations across the U.S., Australia, and Canada. Visitors are invited to explore www.enrollsy.com to discover how Enrollsy’s solutions are transforming the enrollment experience and simplifying administrative processes.

About Enrollsy Enrollsy provides a complete, easy-to-use solution for managing enrollments, payments, and participant communications. Designed for non-technical professionals, Enrollsy’s mission is to simplify enrollment for organizations while delivering unmatched support and flexibility. Visit www.enrollsy.com to learn more about how Enrollsy is shaping the future of enrollment.

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SOURCE Enrollsy, Inc.

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