https://x.com/i/article/2116114353250512896

【X 长文】Apollo Go: "Right" This Way for a Firsthand Look in London and Hong Kong

Welcome to the October issue of AI Pulse.

This month, we brought Apollo Go autonomous vehicles closer to the people they were built for. In London, we welcomed reporters on board for test rides for the first time. In Hong Kong, we are giving more than 1,000 residents the opportunity to ride with us for free in the city's first large-scale public trial of autonomous vehicles. Building on the progress in right-hand-drive markets shared in the July issue of AI Pulse, these moments mark another step forward for Apollo Go in a market that accounts for roughly one-third of the world’s roads.

We're also counting down to Baidu World 2026 on November 12. This year's theme, "Next Chapter, Intelligent Organizations," looks at what happens when AI moves beyond helping individuals and starts working across entire organizations. Read on for a first look at what's on the agenda.

Apollo Go: Opening the Doors to Riders in Right-Hand-Drive Markets

Testing an autonomous vehicle on public roads is one milestone. Inviting people to sit inside it is another. That second step is where trust starts to build, one ride at a time, and it's where Apollo Go spent much of October.

London and Hong Kong are both right-hand-drive cities, each with its own road layouts, traffic patterns, and driving habits. Bringing Apollo Go to riders in both places this month reflects how far our technology has adapted beyond the cities where it started.

London: First Rides with the Media and Self-Driving Industry Awards

Since the summer, we've been testing our RT6 vehicles on London roads, starting in the borough of Brent. In October, we took the next step and welcomed a group of reporters alongside FREENOW by Lyft for test rides, the first time the media have experienced Apollo Go in London. As the skies cleared after days of rain, they rode through the streets around Wembley Stadium and saw for themselves how the vehicle handles one of the world's busiest cities. Media including Reuters and ITV joined the ride, to explore what driverless taxis could mean for London as they move toward launch.

Reuters spoke with Danny O'Gorman, General Manager of FREENOW UK, who described London's speed bumps, narrow streets and 20 mph roads as a particularly good testing ground, likening the car's progress to a learner preparing for a driving test. ITV News London joined us for a ride and captured drone footage featuring panoramic views of Wembley Stadium, exploring how driverless taxis like ours could reach London's roads by 2027.

Together with FREENOW by Lyft, we're working toward fully driverless vehicles on London roads next year, with the aim of launching a commercial service in 2027.

Winning the Consumer Service Award from Self-Driving Industry Awards

The UK industry also recognized our work this month. Apollo Go won the Consumer Service Award at the 2026 Self-Driving Industry Awards, organized by @CarsOFuture. Our service is designed around riders' needs, from helping bridge gaps in public transport to supporting riders with different mobility needs. We're grateful to our riders, teams, and partners for helping us move that work forward.

Hong Kong: Welcoming the Public for the City's First Large-Scale Trial

This month, Apollo Go moved one step closer to everyday life in Hong Kong. We brought the Apollo Go ride experience to Tung Chung, a residential new town on Lantau Island that is home to more than 100,000 people.

On October 10, we were honored to share Apollo Go's progress in Tung Chung with Ms. Candy Kwok, Deputy Commissioner for Transport (Transport Services and Management) of Hong Kong, and members of the Transport Department's Autonomous Vehicle Applications Promotion Working Group.

A few days later, we invited a dozen Hong Kong reporters to join us for test rides and experience what it's like to travel in an autonomous vehicle through the busy streets of Tung Chung. As the South China Morning Post noted from the back seat, the safety operator kept his hands off the wheel for most of the ride, while a touch screen let passengers adjust the air conditioning, seats and windows, and lock the doors themselves.

Then, on October 21, we opened the doors to the public. From October 21 to November 3, more than 1,000 residents will have the opportunity to take free rides with Apollo Go as part of Hong Kong's first large-scale public trial of autonomous vehicles. Riders will travel with a safety operator on board. Their feedback will help shape how the service develops in the city.

This builds on the 280,000 kilometers we've safely covered in Hong Kong so far. Our goal is simple: to make safe, accessible, and efficient autonomous travel part of everyday life in the city.

On November 12, Baidu World 2026 returns to the China National Convention Center II in Beijing, under the theme "Next Chapter, Intelligent Organizations."

As more businesses move from using AI to save time on individual tasks to rethinking how whole teams and workflows run, a new question is taking shape: how do you turn AI into real productivity across an organization? Here's what to look out for this year.

Robin's Take on What's Next

Our founder and CEO Robin Li will open the event with a keynote sharing his latest thinking on where AI is heading. At Baidu World 2025, he called on businesses to internalize AI capabilities so that AI becomes a native driver of both business growth and personal development. At Baidu Create in May, he went further, outlining his "evolution theory" for the AI era and how organizations themselves can evolve. This year, he'll look at where AI goes next and what it means for intelligent organizations.

Upgrades across Our Full Stack

We'll launch several new products and share the latest upgrades across our full-stack AI, from chips and cloud to models and agents. As AI moves deeper into real business operations, companies increasingly need infrastructure, models, tools and applications that work together as one system rather than as separate pieces. We'll show what our full stack looks like for the age of agents, and how AI is moving further into organizations and industries.

A Roadmap to Becoming an Intelligent Organization

Twelve sub-forums will explore how businesses can make that shift, covering AI at work, organizational evolution, scaling agents, and helping people and teams thrive. Sessions will look at how agents can drive real productivity for an organization, how to bring scattered AI tools together into a shared organizational capability, and how businesses can go from using AI to becoming AI-powered enterprises. Industry-focused sessions will also share practical examples from embodied AI, marketing, AI gaming, automotive, and public services. Here's a first look at some of the sessions:

- Organizational Evolution: Driving Transformation with AI

- From Using AI to Becoming an AI-Powered Enterprise

- DuMate in Action: AI Agents Powering the Next Wave of Productivity

- Building Embodied AI That Understands, Acts, and Scales

- The AI-Native Revolution in Game Worlds

From Super Individuals to Stronger Teams

AI is expanding what one person can do, giving rise to "super individuals." The next step is turning that individual capability into something that can be shared, reused, and scaled across a team. Sub-forums will explore the products, technology, and ways of working that help move from individual intelligence to organizational intelligence. Our 30+ AI open classes will help developers, business teams, and working professionals build practical skills across three tracks:

- AI WHY: Why is everyone building AI agents? Why are more companies deploying AI?

- AI HOW: How do you actually use AI? How does a real project go from idea to launch?

- AI WOW: What happens when AI enters different fields?

See Intelligent Organizations in Action

We'll also explore frontier topics including Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI), in which AI systems improve their own capabilities without human intervention, and AI for Science (AI4S), with sessions on how AI is reshaping life sciences, scientific research, and drug discovery. Across a 6,000-square-meter exhibition area, visitors can try our full-stack AI firsthand and see, through live demos, how AI fits into everyday workflows and what it looks like when people and agents work side by side.

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Unlimited OCR 2 Is Here, and It's Open Source!

- Our upgraded OCR model can read and parse documents of virtually unlimited length while working within a fixed amount of memory.

- A new mechanism called SR-SWA keeps longer documents from slowing things down, so reading speed and memory use stay nearly constant as documents grow.

- It delivers state-of-the-art results on MPDocBench and MarathonDocBench.

- Learn more: GitHub | Hugging Face

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