Baidu won't be delivering food via drones to customers anymore, as the company has announced that it is pulling the plug on the project and concentrate instead on artificial intelligence.
Lin Yuanqing, senior director of the Chinese search engine giant's Deep Learning Laboratory, announced the cancellation of the Baidu Takeaway project at the China Artificial Intelligence Conference on Friday, Technology News China reported.
According to Lin, the company's decision to end the project was due to the market for drones not being that big to profitable. He also said that they would be facing stiff competition from drone manufacturer DJI since Baidu itself doesn't manufacture drones.
DJI has been rising in popularity recently with its line of new consumer-friendly drones.
Baidu launched Takeaway in 2015 to provide drone-based food delivery services to customers in different locations. The company has also considered using drone technology for mapping purposes but ultimately dropped the plan.
With the project dropped, Lin said that the company will instead focus on further developing artificial intelligence technologies, All Chine Tech reported. He added that Baidu will primarily focus on six core areas including deep learning aggregation platforms, basic and fine-grained image recognition, medical image recognition, video analysis and augmented reality.
According to Lin, Baidu will open several deep learning projects to the public in September in the hopes of facilitating further development. He cited optical character recognition (OCR) technology as an example, where Baidu's own mobile terminal ID recognition scored an accuracy of 99 percent.
Meanwhile, Baidu's Nuomi service will unveil a new feature for its mobile app in September that would allow it to recommend restaurants just by studying the pictures stored on users' phones. The feature will rely heavily on the company's fine-grained image recognition technology.
Baidu will also begin to push augmented reality (AR) forth this year, Lin revealed. The officer said that AR technology will be closely tied to the development self-driving vehicles, with AT advancing greatly. Lin expects Baidu's AR unit to deliver profits this year.