Speaking in the keynote at Baidu's AI developer conference in Beijing, Baidu president and COO Qi Lu described his company's plans to work with NVIDIA to:

˙Bring next-generation NVIDIA Volta GPUs to Baidu Cloud, providing the deep learning platform to cloud customers.

˙Adopt NVIDIA's DRIVE PX platform for Baidu's self-driving car initiative, and develop self-driving cars with major Chinese carmakers.

˙Optimize Baidu's PaddlePaddle open source deep learning framework for NVIDIA Volta GPUs and make it widely available to academics and researchers.

˙Bring AI capabilities to Chinese consumers by adding Baidu's DuerOS conversational AI system to NVIDIA SHIELD TV.

"NVIDIA and Baidu have pioneered significant advances in deep learning and AI," said Ian Buck, NVIDIA vice president and general manager of accelerated computing. "We believe AI is the most powerful technology force of our time, with the potential to revolutionize every industry. Our collaboration aligns our technical resources to create AI computing platforms for all developers -- from academic research, startups creating breakthrough AI applications, and autonomous vehicles."

"Baidu and NVIDIA will work together on our Apollo self-driving car platform, using NVIDIA's automotive technology. We'll also work closely to make PaddlePaddle the deep learning framework; advance our conversational AI system, DuerOS; and accelerate research at the Institute of Deep Learning." said Baidu's Lu at the company's event.

Baidu announced that it will deploy NVIDIA HGX architecture with Tesla Volta V100 and Tesla P4 GPU accelerators for AI training and inference in its data centers.

Combined with Baidu's PaddlePaddle deep learning framework and NVIDIA's TensorRT deep learning inference software, researchers and companies can harness state-of-the-art technology to develop products and services with real-time understanding of images, speech, text and video.

To accelerate AI development, the companies will work together to optimize Baidu's open-source PaddlePaddle deep learning framework on NVIDIA's Volta GPU architecture.

Baidu announced that it has selected NVIDIA's DRIVE PX 2 AI supercomputer for its autonomous vehicle platform.

The two companies have collaborated on Baidu's self-driving car initiative known as Apollo. Apollo, an open platform for self-driving cars, leverages NVIDIA technology from the server to the car, including Tesla GPUs and NVIDIA DRIVE PX 2, combined with NVIDIA software including CUDA and TensorRT.

Baidu DuerOS, the company's conversational AI system, will provide voice command capabilities to NVIDIA's SHIELD TV in the China market.A version of the streamer, with custom software made for China, will be available later this year.