The Chinese tech heavyweight, Baidu Inc, reported its total revenue reached 33.9 billion yuan ($4.67 billion) in the second quarter of this year on Thursday, which was essentially flat from last year, with artificial intelligence technology becoming an important growth driver for the company.?

Revenue from Baidu’s core businesses came up to 26.7 billion yuan during the April-June period, an increase of 1 percent year-on-year, while its net profits stood at 5.5 billion yuan, up 5 percent year-on-year.?

Robin Li, co-founder and CEO of Baidu, said in a statement that the transformative impact of generative AI and foundation models is becoming more tangible in business and everyday life.

"Throughout all layers of our AI technology stack and with the rapid adoption of applications built on top of Ernie (Baidu’s large language model), we are scaling AI to address real-world problems and generate substantial value both for external customers and our own product portfolio," Li said.

"As we speeded up the AI-native transformation of our products in the second quarter, we continued to optimize our operations and maintained a healthy margin," said Luo Rong, chief financial officer of Baidu, adding the company expects to maintain strong momentum in its AI cloud business.

Apollo Go, Baidu's autonomous ride-hailing service, started offering fully driverless operations across the entire Wuhan municipality, the capital of Hubei province, in June.

It provided about 899,000 rides in the second quarter, up 26 percent year-on-year. As of July 28, the cumulative rides provided to the public by Apollo Go surpassed 7 million.