Baidu Inc.'s (NASDAQ:BIDU) (9888.HK) revenue from its general business grew 2% year-on-year to 26 billion yuan ($3.82 billion) in the first quarter, as its core AI-driven business accounted for more than half of the total for the first time, according to its results released on May 18. AI-related revenue rose 49% during the quarter to 13.6 billion yuan, making up 52% of total general business revenue.

The company's non-GAAP income totaled 4.3 billion yuan, compared with 6.5 billion yuan a year earlier.

During the quarter, the company's AI Cloud Infra business, which has been upgraded for large-scale agent-based applications, surged 79% to 8.8 billion yuan, with GPU cloud revenue up 184%.

AI applications generated 2.5 billion yuan during the quarter, the company said. During the company's annual developer conference, Baidu unveiled a series of updates to its agent portfolio. Baidu co-founder and CEO Robin Li also introduced a new metric, "daily active agents" (DAA), to gauge AI productivity, contending that tokens represent cost, not value, making them less useful for measuring the success of AI. He also projected that global DAA could eventually exceed 10 billion.

On chip development, the company's Kunlun P800 chip is scaling production and deployment, and the company plans to roll out its M100 chip, optimized for large-scale inference with high cost effectiveness. Meanwhile, Apollo Go, Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing service, completed 3.2 million fully driverless rides in the quarter, up more than 120% year-on-year. Its reach now spans 27 cities worldwide, with active operations in Dubai and upcoming trials in Switzerland and London in partnership with Uber and Lyft, and cumulative rides provided to the public exceeding 22 million.

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