Baidu also unveiled a pair of glasses with a built-in AI assistant, expected to rival Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses. The company's AI cloud business offset the "ongoing weakness" in its online marketing stream, according to Li. Baidu's robotaxi business, Apollo Go, reported a 20% year-on-year surge in rides in the third quarter, with the average number of rides a month rising to 329,333. The company also announced a management rotation, with Junjie He becoming the interim CFO.
Key takeaways:
- Baidu reported a 3% annual drop in third-quarter revenue, but still beat market expectations with a revenue of $4.78 billion and a 14% rise in net income to $1.09 billion.
- The company's non-online marketing revenue surged by 12% to $1.1 billion, primarily driven by its artificial intelligence cloud business.
- Baidu's Ernie chatbot, a local alternative to OpenAI's ChatGPT, now has 430 million users and programs access its underlying AI model around 1.5 billion times a day.
- Baidu's Xiaodu AI Glasses, equipped with Ernie's AI capabilities and Baidu's maps and search functions, will begin sales in the first half of next year, posing as a Chinese alternative to Meta's popular Ray-Ban smart glasses.