Lenovo and Baidu collaborate on a third China AI smartphone deal

In its most recent collaboration with a phone manufacturer, China's Baidu has teamed up with Lenovo to integrate its generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology into Lenovo's smartphones.

Baidu is actively looking for real-world uses for its AI model.

Lenovo will use its Ernie large language model (LLM) as part of the partnership, which is similar to the ones with Samsung and Honor that were announced last month, a representative for Beijing-based Baidu told reporters this week.

In addition to selling phones under its own brand, Lenovo also owns the Motorola phone brand. Lenovo's tablets and desktop PCs already come with Ernie integrated into the browser and app store applications.

With the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, generative AI technology gained widespread recognition, and selling smartphones with these features for services like chatbots and real-time translation has since become a new global trend.

Google is seen as a leader in AI smartphones with its Pixel phones and robust cloud-based AI, while Apple has been reported to be working to bring generative AI models to the iPhone.

The research firm Canalys projects that 60 million smartphones, or 5% of all smartphones shipped worldwide in 2024, will be AI-capable devices.

However, China cannot use AI services powered by American companies like Google and OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT; hence, Chinese companies dominate the industry. Currently, over 200 AI models are available on the Chinese market, some of which are from Baidu's main competitors, Alibaba and Tencent.

In November of last year, Robin Li, the CEO of Baidu, stated that businesses should now concentrate on creating useful applications. Leading Chinese phone manufacturers Vivo, Xiaomi, and Huawei are also developing on-device AI models; however, they have not yet shared any information.