• Baidu, Inc (NASDAQ: BIDU) introduced a robotaxi service for the public in Wuhan between 7 am - 11 pm without safety drivers behind the wheel.

• Previously, Baidu's crewless vehicles could only operate from 9 am - 5 pm in the city, TechCrunch reports.

• Also Read: Cruise Expands Robotaxi Service In Additional Cities In Record Time, CEO Says

• The scheme will likely cover one million customers in some regions of Wuhan. The city has more than 10 million people.

• Like most autonomous vehicle startups, Baidu combines a mix of third-party cameras, radars, and lidars to help its cars see better in low-visibility conditions, in contrast to Tesla Inc's (NASDAQ: TSLA) vision-based solution.

• In August, Baidu started offering fully driverless robotaxi rides, charging passengers at taxi rates.

• One of the moats Baidu built is its visual-language model for identifying unseen or rare objects in long-tail scenarios. The AI is backed by Wenxin, the same large model that undergirds its text-to-image art platform.

• The model will enable autonomous vehicles to quickly make sense of an unseen object, like special vehicle (fire truck, ambulance) recognition, plastic bag misdetection, and others," Baidu previously said.

• Additionally, Baidu's autonomous driving perception model, a sub-model of the WenXin Big Model, leveraged more than 1 billion parameters to improve the potential of autonomous driving perception.

• Price Action: BIDU shares traded higher by 1.86% at $113.69 premarket on the last check Tuesday.

• Photo via wikimedia Commons

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