China’s Baidu says its Kunlun chip cluster can train DeepSeek-like models

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By Che Pan and Brenda Goh

BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) -China’s Baidu has successfully “illuminated” a cluster comprising 30,000 of its self-developed, third generation P800 Kunlun chips, which can support the training of DeepSeek-like models, its CEO said on Friday.

Robin Li made the announcement at the company’s annual developer conference where the Chinese search engine giant is giving updates on its artificial intelligence (AI) efforts. “Illuminated” means switching the cluster on and preparing it for training tasks.

The P800 cluster can support the training of DeepSeek-like models with hundreds of billions parameters or a thousand customers fine-tuning models with billions of parameters at the same time, he said.

Baidu said Chinese banks and Internet companies had adopted the P800 chips.

Li also unveiled Baidu’s latest AI model, Ernie 4.5 Turbo, saying it matched the industry’s best in several benchmark tests, demonstrating abilities ranging from coding to linguistic comprehension. The company also launched a new reasoning model called Ernie X1 Turbo, and said it would incorporate its AI abilities across its apps from its cloud drive and content platform Baidu Wenku.

“There are many (AI) models, but it’s apps that rule the world. The application is the king,” Li said. “Without apps, models and chips are worthless.”

The product launch comes at a time of heightened competition in China’s AI market, with tech firms shifting focus from foundation model development to the search for applications beyond AI chatbots that can attract and retain users.

Baidu was among the first major Chinese companies to invest heavily in AI following the 2022 debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, its Ernie Bot has struggled to gain traction amid fierce competition.

(Reporting by Che Pan and Brenda Goh; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Kate Mayberry)