Baidu’s 2022 ESG Report Highlights “Safe and Controllable” as Highest Principle of AI Ethics

Baidu, Inc has recently released its 2022 ESG report, providing updates to the company’s 2022 ESG performance in critical areas including enhancing corporate governance, building trust, nurturing talents, promoting green ides, improving service quality, and contributing to the society.

Click here to see Baidu 2022 ESG Full Report.

In the opening speech of the Report, Robin Li, Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Baidu, said, “We care not only about the improvement of production efficiency brought by AI, but also the fairness and accountability of AI and algorithms. AI has evolved to a stage where all sectors are destined to be transformed by it.” He once again addressed the “four principles of AI ethics,” namely:

• AI should be “safe and controllable”, which is the highest principle.
• AI’s innovative vision is to promote more equal access to technologies and abilities for humanity.
• The value of AI is to empower mankind to learn and grow instead of surpassing and replacing mankind.
• The ultimate ideal of AI is to bring more freedom and possibilities to humankind.

Baidu is committed to promoting sustainable social transformation through green AI technology to explore and create new social development opportunities.

In green mobility, Baidu has been proactively finding greener transportation solutions through technologies. It collaborated with China Academy of Transportation of Sciences to study carbon emission reduction through intelligent transportation solutions. The findings revealed that the annual reduced carbon emissions contributed by building Vehicle-Road collaboration (V2R) infrastructure in the 72 square kilometers Beijing High-level Autonomous Driving Demonstration Zone is equivalent to planting 500,000 trees.

Baidu has been continuously optimizing private mobility by applying autonomous driving technology into new energy vehicles (NEVs) to contribute to energy conservation and emission reduction. As of January 2023, Baidu’s autonomous ride-hailing platform Apollo Go had received over 2 million orders, making the company the world’s largest autonomous ride-hailing service provider.

Safeguarding security and privacy is also a key priority topic for Baidu. To date, Baidu has contributed to the preparation of close to 100 AI safety and ethics standards, covering algorithms, privacy protection, deep learning, autonomous driving, smart terminals, system services, and a wide range of additional components. In 2022, Baidu’s self-developed ERNIE Big Model has been used in place of traditional data classification technique to achieve automatic data management, greatly enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of Baidu’s data security governance.

In talent development, Baidu has trained over 3 million AI talents through collaborations with top Chinese universities as of February 2023. It is over halfway towards its goal of training 5 million AI talents within five years. Baidu also puts workplace diversity at the forefront of its talent development, a manifestation of which is that female representation in the management has increased to 43.9%, above the industry average.

Grounded in the company’s mission to “make the complicated world simpler through technology,” Baidu remains committed to digging further into the potentials of ESG concepts in corporate governance and offsetting uncertainties with the sustainable-growth mentality.

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