Last year, Chinese tech giant Baidu, under its Baidu Takeaway brand, launched a new courier food delivery service that uses drones instead of people. Recently, Baidu announced that it is dropping its Takeaway service, as well as several other projects related to it.

In a statement, Baidu director of deep learning laboratory Lin Yuanqing said, "Unmanned aerial vehicles are indeed a very good project, but we are puzzled with how Baidu can compete with DJI, because we do not produce them."

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Lin added that the market value of drones used for food delivery is not the big, hence the decision to abandon the project. The director also said that its technologies are better off used in other places.

Although Baidu is giving up on its drone projects, the company is still optimistic about its artificial intelligence research. Drones are currently hailed as a very lucrative market, and Baidu cites that software and technology behind these drones are still a viable outlet for business.

Baidu's artificial intelligence division is currently tasked with researching on six possible outlets" augmented reality technology, fine-grained image recognition, basic image recognition, deep learning platform, and medical image recognition."

Lin said that Baidu's image recognition technology is currently high-ranking. He added that the technology is equipped with a mobile terminal ID recognition accuracy of more than 99 percent. Regarding its fine grained image recognition technology, Lin said that Baidu would launch new features for the Noumi application this September.

TagsBaidu, Baidu news, baidu drone, Baidu artificial intelligence, Baidu AI