Baidu Inc unveils AI-powered programming tool 'Miaoda'

Baidu World 2024 is held in Shanghai on Nov 12, 2024. (Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn)

Chinese technology giant Baidu Inc unveiled its new artificial intelligence-powered tool "Miaoda" on Tuesday, allowing users to become programmers without grasping coding skills.

The new tool was released during the Baidu World 2024 Conference held in Shanghai.

"Miaoda" can coordinate various AI agents and achieve programming without coding. It can also use various tools in a large scale, said Baidu Inc co-founder Robin Li.

The new product is currently open for pre-order and is expected to be launched in the first quarter of 2025.

Li said at the conference that AI agents are the mainstream form of AI applications at present and may embrace explosive growth soon. AI agents are the new carriers of content, information and services, he said.

Based on such forecast, Baidu Inc will focus on the development of four categories of AI agents targeting companies, roles, tools, and industries, said Li.

At present, Baidu's AI agent platform has attracted 150,000 enterprises and 800,000 developers.

Also released on Tuesday was "Wenxin iRAG". Based on retrieval-augmented generation technology, the new product combines Baidu's image resources with the basic model capabilities to generate a variety of hyper-real pictures. It can significantly improve the usability of AI-generated pictures. Incurring no cost, the new product can provide pictures immediately and solve the problem of hallucination.

The biggest change in the AI industry in the past 24 months is that LLMs has basically eliminated hallucination, said Li.

Baidu Inc released at the Tuesday meeting the "Free Canvas" tool. It allows users to freely drag and drop documents, audio and video and other media materials on a "canvas-like" interface to quickly generate multi-modal content. The tool can help users to search for information, edit, generate content and share results.

The company also unveiled the new AI-powered glasses, which combines first-person perspective shooting, encyclopedia, audio-visual translation, intelligent memo, among others. The glasses will be made available to consumers in the first half of 2025.