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Baidu CEO Robin Li speaks during the company’s Create conference in Shenzhen, China, on April 16, 2024.

Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images

SHENZHEN, China – One year after Chinese search engine operator Baidu released its ChatGPT-like Ernie bot, the company this week announced tools to encourage locals to develop artificial intelligence applications.

“In China today, there are 1 billion internet users, strong foundation models, sufficient AI application scenarios and the most complete industrial system in the world,” CEO Robin Li said in his opening speech at Baidu’s annual AI developers conference on Tuesday.

“Everyone can be a developer,” he said in Mandarin, according to a CNBC translation.

While many point out how China lags behind the U.S. in artificial intelligence capabilities, others emphasize how the strength of the Chinese market lies more in technological application. Take next-day e-commerce and 30-minute food delivery, for example.

Baidu’s newly announced AI tools allow people with no coding knowledge to create generative AI-powered chatbots for specific functions, which can then be integrated in a website, Baidu search engine results or other online portals. That’s different from a similar tool called GPTs that OpenAI launched earlier this year, since those custom-built chatbots — for everything from suggesting movies to fixing code — sit within the ChatGPT interface.

Expect AI to become as universal as email: HSBC

The basic Baidu tools are generally available to try for free, up until a certain usage limit, similar to some of Google’s cloud and AI functions. OpenAI charges a monthly fee for the latest version of ChatGPT and the ability to use it for computer programs. The older ChatGPT 3.5 model is free to use, but without access to the custom-built GPTs.

Baidu this week also announced three new versions of its Ernie AI model — called “Speed,” “Lite” and “Tiny” — that coders can selectively access, based on the complexity of the task.  

“It feels like their focus is on building the entire native AI development ecosystem, providing a full set of development tools and platform solutions,” said Bo Du, managing director at WestSummit Capital Management. That’s according to a CNBC translation of the Chinese remarks.

Baidu said this week that Ernie bot has accumulated more than 200 million users since its launch in March last year, and that computer programs are accessing the underlying AI model 200 million times a day. The company said more than 85,000 business clients have used its AI cloud platform to create 190,000 AI applications.

How the tech is being used

Many of the use cases Baidu showed off this week centered on consumer-facing applications: tourism and creation of content such as picture books and scheduling meetings.

In a demonstration hall, Baidu business departments showed off how the AI tools could be integrated with virtual people doing livestreams, or directing search engine traffic to an AI-based interactive buying guide.

Buysmart.AI, which won Baidu’s AI competition last year, uses the tech for an online shopping assistant connected to Chinese social media platform Weibo. The startup said it is using ChatGPT for a standalone interactive e-commerce app in the U.S.

“Personally I think that Ernie 4.0 has a better grasp of Chinese than ChatGPT 3.5,” Buysmart.AI co-founder Andy Qiu said in an interview. That’s according to a CNBC translation of his Mandarin-language remarks.

Consumers in the U.S. are currently more interested in AI products than users in China are, Qiu said. But he said that overall there is still room for improvement when it comes to building consumers’ trust of AI assistants and convincing users to place an order.

Also on display was a humanoid robot developed by Shenzhen-based UBTech Robotics that used Baidu’s Ernie AI model for understanding commands and reading written words.

It’s not immediately clear how such AI applications can significantly change business at this point. But Baidu is the latest to roll out more tools for people to experiment more easily and cheaply with.

Customer service, voice assistants and internet-connected devices can use smaller AI models to respond quickly to users, pointed out Helen Chai, managing director at CIC Consulting.

She added that in scenarios such as legal consultation or medical diagnosis, small AI models can be trained on specific data to achieve performance that’s comparable to larger AI models.

In the future, big AI-based applications will be based on a mixture of models, Baidu CEO Li said, using the technical term of “mixture of experts” or MoE.

He also promoted Baidu’s capabilities in AI-produced code, one of the areas in which Silicon Valley tech companies see the most potential for generative AI.

Baidu said since it deployed its “Comate” AI coding assistant a year ago, the tool has contributed to 27% of the tech company’s newly generated code. Audio streaming app Ximalaya, IT services company iSoftStone and Shanghai Mitsubishi Elevator are among more than 10,000 corporate Comate users, and have adopted nearly half of the code the tool generates, according to Baidu.

The global rush for developing generative AI has created a shortage in the semiconductors needed to provide the computing power. Chinese companies face added constraints due to U.S. restrictions on chip exports.

Baidu did not specifically discuss a shortage in computing power during the main conference session. In his speech, Dou Shen, head of AI cloud at Baidu, noted “uncertainties” in the chip supply chain and announced that Baidu has a platform that can access the power of several different kinds of chips.

Back in February, Li said on an earnings call that Baidu’s AI chip reserve “enables us to continue enhancing Ernie for the next one or two years.” The company is set to release first-quarter results on May 16.

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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire’s Mamdani comments

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Tech founders call on Sequoia Capital to denounce VC Shaun Maguire's Mamdani comments

Almost 600 people have signed an open letter to leaders at venture firm Sequoia Capital after one of its partners, Shaun Maguire, posted what the group described as a “deliberate, inflammatory attack” against the Muslim Democratic mayoral candidate in New York City.

Maguire, a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump, posted on X over the weekend that Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary last month, “comes from a culture that lies about everything” and is out to advance “his Islamist agenda.”

The post had 5.3 million views as of Monday afternoon. Maguire, whose investments include Elon Musk’s SpaceX and X as well as artificial intelligence startup Safe Superintelligence, also published a video on X explaining the remark.

Those signing the letter are asking Sequoia to condemn Maguire’s comments and apologize to Mamdani and Muslim founders. They also want the firm to authorize an independent investigation of Maguire’s behavior in the past two years and post “a zero-tolerance policy on hate speech and religious bigotry.”

They are asking the firm for a public response by July 14, or “we will proceed with broader public disclosure, media outreach and mobilizing our networks to ensure accountability,” the letter says.

Sequoia declined to comment. Maguire didn’t respond to a request for comment, but wrote in a post about the letter on Wednesday that, “You can try everything you want to silence me, but it will just embolden me.”

Among the signees are Mudassir Sheikha, CEO of ride-hailing service Careem, and Amr Awadallah, CEO of AI startup Vectara. Also on the list is Abubakar Abid, who works in machine learning Hugging Face, which is backed by Sequoia, and Ahmed Sabbah, CEO of Telda, a financial technology startup that Sequoia first invested in four years ago.

At least three founders of startups that have gone through startup accelerator program Y Combinator added their names to the letter.

Sequoia as a firm is no stranger to politics. Doug Leone, who led the firm until 2022 and remains a partner, is a longtime Republican donor, who supported Trump in the 2024 election. Following Trump’s victory in November, Leone posted on X, “To all Trump voters:  you no longer have to hide in the shadows…..you’re the majority!!”

By contrast, Leone’s predecessor, Mike Moritz, is a Democratic megadonor, who criticized Trump and, in August, slammed his colleagues in the tech industry for lining up behind the Republican nominee. In a Financial Times opinion piece, Moritz wrote Trump’s tech supporters were “making a big mistake.”

“I doubt whether any of them would want him as part of an investment syndicate that they organised,” wrote Moritz, who stepped down from Sequoia in 2023, over a decade after giving up a management role at the firm. “Why then do they dismiss his recent criminal conviction as nothing more than a politically inspired witch-hunt over a simple book-keeping error?”

Neither Leone nor Moritz returned messages seeking comment.

Roelof Botha, Sequoia’s current lead partner, has taken a more neutral stance. Botha said at an event last July that Sequoia as a partnership doesn’t “take a political point of view,” adding that he’s “not a registered member of either party.” Boelof said he’s “proud of the fact that we’ve enabled many of our partners to express their respected individual views along the way, and given them that freedom.”

Maguire has long been open with his political views. He said on X last year that he had “just donated $300k to President Trump.”

Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has gained the ire of many people in tech and in the business community more broadly since defeating former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo in the June primary.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

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Samsung expects second-quarter profits to more than halve as it struggles to capture AI demand

Samsung signage during the Nvidia GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California, US, on Thursday, March 20, 2025.

David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics on Tuesday forecast a 56% fall in profits for the second as the company struggles to capture demand from artificial intelligence chip leader Nvidia. 

The memory chip and smartphone maker said in its guidance that operating profit for the quarter ending June was projected to be around 4.6 trillion won, down from 10.44 trillion Korean won year over year.

The figure is a deeper plunge compared to smart estimates from LSEG, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate.

According to the smart estimates, Samsung was expected to post an operating profit of 6.26 trillion won ($4.57 billion) for the quarter. Meanwhile, Samsung projected its revenue to hit 74 trillion won, falling short of LSEG smart estimates of 75.55 trillion won.

Samsung is a leading player in the global smartphone market and is also one of the world’s largest makers of memory chips, which are utilized in devices such as laptops and servers.

However, the company has been falling behind competitors like SK Hynix and Micron in high-bandwidth memory chips — an advanced type of memory that is being deployed in AI chips.

“The disappointing earnings are due to ongoing operating losses in the foundry business, while the upside in high-margin HBM business remains muted this quarter,” MS Hwang, Research Director at Counterpoint Research, said about the earnings guidance.

SK Hynix, the leader in HBM, has secured a position as Nvidia’s key supplier. While Samsung has reportedly been working to get the latest version of its HBM chips certified by Nvidia, a report from a local outlet suggests these plans have been pushed back to at least September.

The company did not respond to a request for comment on the status of its deals with Nvidia.

Ray Wang, Research Director of Semiconductors, Supply Chain and Emerging Technology at Futurum Group told CNBC that it is clear that Samsung has yet to pass Nvidia’s qualification for its most advanced HBM.

“Given that Nvidia accounts for roughly 70% of global HBM demand, the delay meaningfully caps near-term upside,” Wang said. He noted that while Samsung has secured some HBM supply for AI processors from AMD, this win is unlikely to contribute to second-quarter results due to the timing of production ramps.

Meanwhile, Samsung’s chip foundry business continues to face weak orders and serious competition from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Wang added.

Reuters reported in September that Samsung had instructed its subsidiaries worldwide to cut 30% of staff in some divisions, citing sources familiar with the matter.

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Waymo to begin testing in Philadelphia with safety drivers behind the wheel

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Waymo to begin testing in Philadelphia with safety drivers behind the wheel

A Waymo autonomous self-driving Jaguar electric vehicle sits parked at an EVgo charging station in Los Angeles, California, on May 15, 2024.

Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images

Waymo said it will begin testing in Philadelphia, with a limited fleet of vehicles and human safety drivers behind the wheel.

“This city is a National Treasure,” Waymo wrote in a post on X on Monday. “It’s a city of love, where eagles fly with a gritty spirit and cheese that spreads and cheese that steaks. Our road trip continues to Philly next.”

The Alphabet-owned company confirmed to CNBC that it will be testing in Pennsylvania’s largest city through the fall, adding that the initial fleet of cars will be manually driven through the more complex parts of Philadelphia, including downtown and on freeways.

“Folks will see our vehicles driving at all hours throughout various neighborhoods, from North Central to Eastwick, and from University City to as far east as the Delaware River,” a Waymo spokesperson said.

With its so-called road trips, Waymo seeks to collect mapping data and evaluate how its autonomous technology, Waymo Driver, performs in new environments, handling traffic patterns and local infrastructure. Road trips are often used a way for the company to gauge whether it can potentially offer a paid ride share service in a particular location.

The expanded testing, which will go through the fall, comes as Waymo aims for a broader rollout. Last month, the company announced plans to drive vehicles manually in New York for testing, marking the first step toward potentially cracking the largest U.S. city. Waymo applied for a permit with the New York City Department of Transportation to operate autonomously with a trained specialist behind the wheel in Manhattan. State law currently doesn’t allow for such driverless operations.

Waymo One provides more than 250,000 paid trips each week across Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, Texas, and is preparing to bring fully autonomous rides to Atlanta, Miami, and Washington, D.C., in 2026.

Alphabet has been under pressure to monetize artificial intelligence products as it bolsters spending on infrastructure. Alphabet’s “Other Bets” segment, which includes Waymo, brought in revenue of $1.65 billion in 2024, up from $1.53 billion in 2023. However, the segment lost $4.44 billion last year, compared to a loss of $4.09 billion the previous year.

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