Chinese tech giant Baidu and Watch Boarding House Hungry Wolves 2 Onlineautomaker Changan have reached a partnership to build a computing center that will facilitate the development of smart and connected vehicles with self-driving capabilities, the companies said on Wednesday. The facility will carry out 1,420 quadrillion operations per second in terms of computing power. Rival automaker Xpeng Motors said last August that it had trained its deep neural network for autonomous driving capabilities at a supercomputing capability of 600 petaFlops, which equals to 600 quadrillion floating-point operations per second, enabled by Alibaba’s cloud computing platform. Great Wall Motor and Geely also launched computing facilities earlier this year, with 670 and 810 petaFlops respectively. Baidu is also developing an artificial intelligence chatbot service for an upcoming new vehicle from Changan, based on its ChatGPT-like tool called ERNIE Bot, according to an announcement. [Baidu announcement, in Chinese]
