Baidu is eyeing AI smart glasses market

Baidu is gunning for the AI-powered smart glasses market, going head-to-head with giants like Meta, Snap, and others.

On Tuesday, during a Shanghai event, Baidu’s hardware brand Xiaodu’s head, Li Ying, explained that the company’s new smart glasses are designed to be “a private assistant.” This move is a serious attempt to jump into the AI hardware game.

So, what exactly can Baidu’s AI glasses do? Powered by its large language model, Ernie, these glasses are set to perform all sorts of tasks. Baidu claims that users will be able to monitor their calorie intake, shoot videos, play music, and even ask the glasses questions about what’s around them.

Think Siri or Alexa, but strapped to your face. But here’s the catch: these glasses are staying in China, at least for now. Baidu’s move to keep them off foreign shelves is a clear sign that it is focused on the local market first, and maybe that’s smart.

Baidu’s game plan for Chinese tech

With Baidu charging in, the AI smart glasses space just got even more crowded. Until now, this market was largely a playground for startups experimenting with smart glasses. Not anymore. Big Chinese tech names are staking their claim.

While Baidu has a long road ahead, it’s entering the race at a time when demand for AI-infused products are exploding. Experts have said that Chinese tech companies are finding ways to close the gap even though they may be lagging behind U.S. firms in terms of the raw power of their language models.

One potential scenario is by leveraging China’s enormous electronics industry to churn out affordable AI-powered consumer products. Meta’s smart glasses, developed with Ray-Ban, sell for up to $379, but they aren’t available in China. It means Baidu has the home-court advantage, and the timing couldn’t be better. 

With an initial release planned for next year, it is positioning itself to offer something big in a market that’s already pumped about AI. For Baidu, this is just the latest project that puts its Ernie language model in the spotlight.

Ernie, recently renamed Wenxiaoyan on mobile, is already embedded in other Xiaodu products, like its virtual dashboard, a family tool for keeping tabs on elderly relatives. This setup enables users to chat with AI-powered doctors, set reminders for medication, and monitor general well-being without needing a smartphone. In an aging society, this is a no-brainer application.

Baidu’s not the only one pushing into AI-powered gadgets. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, has launched its own AI earbuds, which let users interact with their chatbot, Doubao, completely hands-free.

AI giants face off

Baidu’s got another AI product in the pipeline: a new image generator called iRAG. Baidu’s CEO, Robin Li, made it clear that iRAG is no ordinary image generator. Using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), the tool reduces hallucinations—those weird inaccuracies AI sometimes spits out.

Li’s confident about this one: “The biggest change in AI over the last year is reducing hallucinations, and RAG is what makes that possible.” By pulling in accurate information from external sources, iRAG is Baidu’s attempt to boost reliability, something AI-powered tools have struggled with.

Meanwhile, Tencent and Alibaba have seen their stocks soar this year. Baidu’s? Not so much. Baidu’s stock has dropped 26% since January. Why? Investors are frustrated with its AI efforts, and they’re worried about declining ad revenue.

Baidu’s main cash cow is advertising on its search engine, and if that starts to falter, it’s a problem. The company needs these AI projects to work, not just for innovation’s sake but to keep its business model afloat.

Across the Pacific, Meta isn’t resting either. Last Wednesday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg showcased Meta’s newest prototype, Orion, at its annual Connect conference. Zuckerberg didn’t hold back in hyping up the new tech, calling it “the most advanced” in the world.

Orion has holographic displays that blend 2D and 3D content with the real world. It also uses AI to analyze whatever’s in front of the user.

Meta’s stocks got a 2% bump after the announcement, showing that investors liked what they heard. But don’t expect to get your hands on Orion anytime soon; this tech is strictly for internal use and a few lucky developers.

Meta isn’t satisfied with just AR glasses; it is now aiming for a device that could someday replace the smartphone. That’s why it’s pouring resources into something called electromyography (EMG). This tech uses wrist sensors to turn nerve signals into commands, meaning you might one day control devices with a thought.

In 2019, Meta acquired CTRL-labs, a startup focused on EMG, for a cool $1 billion. Zuckerberg also shared what he hopes to achieve: “Sometimes voice is too public; you need a way to send a signal from your brain directly to the device.”

Meta’s other major AI project, the large language model Llama, just got a big update. Version 3.2 now understands charts, graphs, and documents, adding a new level of versatility. Zuckerberg is hyping Llama as the “Linux of AI,” saying it could become an industry standard.

The AI chatbot, built on Llama, now has 500 million monthly active users. To top it all off, Meta rolled out a new version of its Ray-Ban smart glasses, which lets users analyze images, scan QR codes, translate live conversations, and more—no AR display, but plenty of AI firepower.