Baidu Makes Some AI Meta Humans

 Indeed. 

Baidu Unveils Its Metaverse of Custom Virtual Humans

ERIC HAL SCHWARTZ in Voicebot.ai

Chinese tech giant Baidu introduced a metaverse of virtual humans this week at Baidu Create 2021, in deliberate contrast to the presentation by Meta (formerly Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this year. The digital world, named XiRang, is populated by humans and AI interacting through avatars built on the XiLing platform debuting in tandem with XiRang.

METAVERSE XIRANG

XiRang hosts a digital “Creator City” mimicking a physical city with original and recreated locales like the Shaolin Monastery. The virtual world is accessible through an app on computers and smartphones or with Pico virtual reality headsets. Baidu hosted CEO Robin Li and other executives at an AI conference within XiRang this week. Users with a Baidu service account can register on the app and build an avatar to travel around the virtual world, interacting with others by pointing their avatar at another and talking. XiRang, which means ‘land of hope,’ can support up to 100,000 users at a time right now, which Baidu emphasized because its metaverse is still under development.

According to Baidu CEO Robin Li, the metaverse will kick off a “golden era of AI over the next ten years” and the start of “man-computer symbiosis,” which will change the world. Li claims Baidu has more than a million employees working on AI and plans to quintuple that number in the next five years. “Creators are our companions in pursuing our dreams of technology, they are also one of the great driving forces of human progress,” Li said.  .... '