With the unveiling of GPT-5, the global tech community's focus has shifted back to AI. Amidst this wave of AI innovation, every major player is striving to gain an edge and ultimately achieve the ultimate ideal.

Baidu's approach is pragmatic: serving demand and delivering results. As the AI entrepreneurial boom extends across various industries, from e-commerce and gaming to online education, wearables, embodied intelligence, AI toys, and life sciences, a new generation of AI startups is rapidly emerging. What do these startups need?

On August 12, the 10th Baidu AI DAY was held at the Beijing Metadynamics SHOW Innovation Center, centered around "the commercial evolution of AI startups." At the event, Baidu Intelligent Cloud announced the launch of the "AI Venture Capital Acceleration Plan," stating that it will collaborate with investment institutions and government agencies to provide billion-level computing power subsidies, exclusive financing channels, and policy application support for selected enterprises. Through this plan, Baidu Intelligent Cloud has assisted 20 enterprises in securing hundreds of millions of yuan in financing over the past year.

Yuan Fuyu, Vice President of Baidu Group

Clearly, Baidu Intelligent Cloud's role has evolved once again. As the new wave of industrial intelligence accelerates, the platform not only provides the essential resources of the AI era but also builds "highways" for financing and commercial implementation.

This change stems from Baidu Intelligent Cloud's early recognition of the trend: a large number of AI startups, driven by technological innovation, emerging tracks, and business model innovations, are accelerating their rise. An era characterized by extensively connected immersive interactions and intelligent upgrades facilitated by computing is quietly approaching.

Together with numerous AI startups, Baidu Intelligent Cloud dives into various scenarios, providing technology and resources, helping them transition from "product launch with zero foundation" to becoming industry leaders through ecological expansion.

- 01 - The Hardcore Cloud Services Behind AI Startups

"The highest configuration for a game is not about how expensive the graphics card or how powerful the console is, but about the friends you play with."

Many gamers' happiest moments were in the university dormitory, playing games with roommates on computers with modest configurations. After entering the workplace, many gamers upgraded their gaming setups but struggled to recapture that initial joy.

Xinying Suixing launched the "DouDou Game Partner" AI companion assistant, creating dozens of anime AI characters. When users play games or watch movies, they can converse with AI partners. These AI partners can recognize and understand users' on-screen operations, cheer them on during gameplay, share tips, or discuss the movies they are watching. The real-time interaction and emotional resonance provided by "DouDou Game Partner" allows gamers to reclaim their purest joy.

Wang Bihao, Co-founder of Xinying Suixing

"Real-time interaction, emotional resonance" may seem like a simple eight-word phrase, but behind it is a complex multimodal system supporting real-time speech output, image understanding, and low-latency interaction, requiring feedback within milliseconds. The VLM technology provided by Baidu Intelligent Cloud enables "DouDou Game Partner" to achieve a more immersive interaction and companion experience.

The video-from-text race is highly competitive, with players needing to compete on the global stage from the outset. As China's first one-stop AI film production platform, FlimAction integrates AI capabilities into traditional film and television workflows, allowing creators to complete story outlining, character setting, script generation, storyboard creation, voiceover dubbing, and music selection with just a simple sentence, thereby utilizing AI to automatically generate movie-quality video content.

Able to produce professional-level content in a short period, FlimAction significantly enhances efficiency in content creation industries such as film, short videos, and advertising.

Behind FlimAction is the powerful cloud infrastructure provided by Baidu Intelligent Cloud, achieving efficient and stable output in script storyboarding, image generation, video generation, and other links.

In addition to movies, an AI revolution is also tackling the most challenging aspects in the field of medical imaging. Over the past decade, AI has entered imaging modalities such as CT, MRI, and X-ray, but it has been slow to cross the threshold of ultrasound. The inherent flexibility of ultrasound makes it difficult to standardize its inspection process, making it challenging for primary care physicians and young doctors to master this technology, which has become a key bottleneck impeding universal healthcare access. At the same time, limited by the lack of data standardization, the development of ultrasound AI models has been slow.

Dolphin V1.0, launched by Dolphin AI Voice, is the first general-purpose ultrasound large model capable of cross-region and cross-disease applications, achieving an integrated closed loop of "real-time guidance during scanning + automatic reporting after examination," reshaping the way ultrasound is performed.

According to Zheng Haoyun, co-founder of Dolphin AI Voice, told Pencil News, due to radiation concerns, X-ray and CT screenings are not convenient for pediatric pneumonia, and many doctors do not possess the ability to use ultrasound equipment to scan lungs. When ultrasound equipment is combined with the Dolphin V1.0 large model, every doctor can quickly achieve high-precision scanning of children's lungs.

The effectiveness of the Dolphin V1.0 large model is inseparable from the support of Baidu Intelligent Cloud. Baidu Intelligent Cloud's Baige platform serves as the training and deployment base for Dolphin V1.0. The training process is almost uninterrupted, significantly improving development efficiency. By using the Baige platform, Dolphin AI Voice can efficiently run tasks that originally required hundreds of cards on just 48 cards, greatly enhancing model development efficiency.

In addition to the virtual world, Baidu Intelligent Cloud is also deeply involved in reality.

Zhang Jianhua, Partner and Head of Ecological Business at Liweike Technology

Liweike Technology is an emerging player in AI smart glasses, not only focusing on glasses technology but also emphasizing the deep integration of AI and glasses, aiming to create AI glasses that users can genuinely use and wear for extended periods. In terms of hardware, the weight is reduced to ensure user comfort. In terms of AI, Baidu Intelligent Cloud's multimodal solutions are utilized to deeply engage with users' scenarios.

Taking independent travel and outbound tourism as examples, Liweike Technology has launched the "shoot and narrate" function, which instantly generates professional commentary through glasses photography; it has also introduced the "AI pocket notebook" function, supporting continuous two-hour recording and multimodal recording through text, images, and voice; it also supports real-time translation in 128 languages and instant photo translation, integrating the core needs of explanation, recording, and translation in traditional tourism, making it a practical assistant for independent and outbound tourists.

AI not only serves products but also revolutionizes industries.

In the highly competitive e-commerce service sector, enterprise users only pay for real-time results. Established in 2018, Shuxin Technology stands out among competitors, relying on precise AI capabilities to serve four major industries: coffee and tea, health and beauty, luxury home furnishings, and general retail.

Peng Shengcai, Founder of Shuxin Technology

In collaboration with an international leading apparel enterprise, Shuxin Technology applied technologies such as video-from-text and large model product selection, empowering the apparel brand to achieve full-link transformation from product selection, marketing to supply chain, optimizing brand operations across all scenarios. The brand launches thousands of new products every two weeks on e-commerce platforms, which previously required significant manpower for listing, photography, and operation. Now, with the AI technology provided by Baidu Intelligent Cloud, Shuxin Technology precisely analyzes the attributes of the brand's clothing, reducing manpower costs by 60% in the agency operation stage. SKU material costs have also dropped significantly, with the average production cost of a video now one-tenth of its original cost of RMB 200.

In addition to the above, in the spatial intelligence sector, Baidu Intelligent Cloud provides a high-performance cloud-native AI computing platform for large-scale deep learning to VAST, a 3D large model company. VAST's 3D model assets have been widely used in film and television special effects, game development, and other fields.

In the field of embodied intelligence, Baidu Intelligent Cloud provides AI solutions focusing on the four key directions of embodied enterprises: embodied brains, operational control cerebella, embodied dataset construction, and whole-machine ontology research and development. Lingsheng Technology, which creates general-purpose brain-like AI for humanoid and embodied intelligent robots, relies on the technical support of Baidu Intelligent Cloud and demonstrates significant advantages in perception fusion and real-time decision-making. Its robot products have completed initial deployments in service and industrial scenarios. Recently, it open-sourced RealDualVLA, the industry's first truly asynchronous dual-system visual-language-action framework.

Xinying Suixing, FlimAction, Dolphin AI Voice, Liweike Technology... Although they serve different scenarios and users, they all consider Baidu Intelligent Cloud as a key technology and ecological partner because supporting their outstanding performance is a set of market-tested, hardcore cloud empowerment logic:

Oriented towards enterprises' core work tasks, through full-stack technical support, high-performance GPU computing power, storage, and network resources, as well as one-stop development tools, products can break through technical bottlenecks, acquire strong environmental understanding and task execution capabilities, and catalyze the birth of super applications.

With the acceleration of the wave of industrial intelligence, a large number of AI startups driven by technological innovation have emerged. Baidu Intelligent Cloud, with its rich experience in engineering implementation and diversified application scenarios, provides comprehensive support for the commercial evolution of these enterprises.

- 02 - Conquering the "Impossible Triangle" of AI Entrepreneurship

You might ask, why can Baidu Intelligent Cloud's ecosystem frequently produce so many AI startups capable of solving scenario pain points and obtaining hundreds of millions of yuan in financing?

Behind this is not a simple technological upgrade but a shift in service paradigms.

For a long time, AI startups have faced an "impossible triangle": it is difficult to balance technical depth, iteration speed, and cost control.

The efforts of a single company are insufficient to address this chronic issue. Baidu Intelligent Cloud personally steps into the arena, starting from the scenario needs of AI startups, attempting to break through the "impossible triangle".

Since the release of ChatGPT, generative AI has swept the globe over the past three years. The demand for cloud services from AI startups is no longer simply about providing computing power and storage or simply being a companion but rather values trinity support encompassing technology, service, and ecology.

Zhang Wei, Vice President of Baidu Intelligent Cloud and General Manager of Baidu Intelligent Cloud's Pan-Technology Business Department

Based on this, Baidu Intelligent Cloud first provides a full-stack, user-friendly AI infrastructure, enabling AI startups to focus more on exploring technical depth around their core business scenarios. Specifically, Baidu Intelligent Cloud has built a full-stack AI infrastructure supporting exploration across multiple industries and scenarios, from chips to applications, based on Baidu's self-developed Kunlun chip, Baige computing power management platform, ERNIE Bot large model, and Qianfan large model platform.

For AI startups, the industry is rapidly changing, and the window of opportunity is short. The Qianfan platform supports AI startups in rapidly building solutions through "Lego-style" combinations by integrating hundreds of industry-grade models. This means that the time for startups to develop a new model can be directly reduced by 70%.

When facing the issue of product iteration speed, Baidu Intelligent Cloud continuously builds tool platforms to automate most tedious tasks, allowing AI startups to concentrate on improving product iteration speed. For example, the Qianfan ModelBuilder platform has one-stop development capabilities from data processing to model training and then to online deployment, which startups can use in combination. A medical AI startup used the Qianfan ModelBuilder platform and completed the process from algorithm verification to clinical deployment in just three weeks, saving 40% in costs. This is unimaginable in traditional business processes.

AI entrepreneurship is exceptionally costly in terms of computing power, with AI startups prioritizing cost control. Leveraging its pioneering distributed cloud architecture, Baidu Intelligent Cloud enables AI startups to tap into heterogeneous computing resources like GPUs and FPGAs on-demand, reducing costs by over 60% compared to self-built data centers. Furthermore, it introduces the industry-leading MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) system, slashing model maintenance costs by 50% through tools such as model version management, automated testing, and performance monitoring.

Beyond providing "hardcore" tools, Baidu Intelligent Cloud serves as a silent lubricant, supporting AI startups in overlooked areas. It consolidates Baidu's internal and external resources to devise an ecological support plan and, through the "AI Venture Capital Acceleration" program, offers a comprehensive loop of computing power, financing, traffic, and scenarios to selected enterprises.

While using tools and platforms to address current challenges in a "fast, efficient, and economical" manner, Baidu Intelligent Cloud also aims to empower AI startups to go further and sustain longer. After serving numerous AI startups, Baidu Intelligent Cloud has devised a clear and pragmatic "three-stage transition" support path.

During the product validation phase, Baidu Intelligent Cloud offers computing power subsidies and model toolkits, enabling AI startups with minimal products to achieve a "zero-to-one start" and validate their ideas. Once the initial step is successful, products often need to establish benchmark cases in 1-2 vertical scenarios to prove their worth. Baidu Intelligent Cloud then provides industry model libraries and ecological resources to enterprises, assisting them in formulating replicable solutions. As the product matures and the business model becomes viable, the enterprise enters the ecological expansion phase. On Baidu Intelligent Cloud's open platform, it can connect with more partners, ultimately forming a synergistic "technology + data + channels" flywheel and emerging as a formidable leader in the competition.

In the era of large models, innovation transcends single-point breakthroughs, evolving into a capability leap across the entire chain from R&D to product creation and eventual commercialization. With the deep integration of AI and industries, Baidu Intelligent Cloud will continue to act as a "paving stone" for technology and an "accelerator" for business, running alongside more emerging AI forces.