Microsoft-Baidu Self-Driving Partnership Joins BMW, Didi Chuxing In Taking On US Tech Giants

Autonomous driving is catching on globally even though some major work on the technology is still being done in the U.S. The latest company to join the global self-driving race is Microsoft, which has teamed up with its Chinese rival Baidu to spur the global adoption of self-driving. "Today's vehicles already have an impressive level of sophistication when it comes to their ability to capture data. By applying our global cloud AI, machine learning and deep neural network capabilities to that data, we can accelerate the work already being done to make autonomous vehicles safer," Kevin Dallas, corporate vice-president, Microsoft said in the press release Tuesday. Both companies are working on creating the background support for self-driving, including cloud infrastructure, software stack and other services which can support self-driving car functions. Baidu has set-up the Apollo self-driving platform, which the company claims can become the "Android" of the self-driving industry i.e. the company would provide open source software to self-driving car manufacturers just like Google provides to smartphone companies.