Tailor made medicine specifically design only for you but I predict this kind of service is only for rich.
China's Race for Artificial Intelligence (AI) Technology
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Hamartia Antidote
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oh very good call. Yes, it could develop a designer drug just for you. Gene adjustment therapy too.
Jlaw
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Not going to happen. Any tech that make overpaid GP obsolete will be shot down
艹艹艹
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http://gbtimes.com/business/new-chinese-owner-plans-enhance-opera-browser-ai
New Chinese owner plans to enhance Opera browser with AI
JANNE SUOKAS
China’s Kunlun Tech announced on Friday that it has completed the acquisition of the web browser Opera. (Photo: Screenshot - Kunlun.com)
China’s Kunlun Tech announced on Friday that it has completed the acquisition of the web browser Opera and plans to build it around a content platform driven by artificial intelligence.
Kunlun Tech, a Beijing-based online game company, and five other Chinese internet companies including cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360, jointly acquired the Norwegian online browser firm Opera Software ASA at a final price of US$575 million.
The Chinese consortium – Golden Brick Silk Road fund – now owns Opera’s consumer business, including its flagship mobile and desktop browsers, performance and privacy apps, technology licensing outside Opera TV and a stake in a Chinese joint venture.
Kunlun will get a 33.3 percent stake in the business, and its chairman Zhou Yahui will serve as Opera’s chairman while sharing CEO duties with the company’s original CEO Lars Boilesen, according to Sina Finance (link in Chinese).
Opera’s Mediaworks, Apps & Games, Opera TV, as well as Skyfire video compression technology and Surfeasy VPN software were left out of the deal after the Chinese bidders failed to get regulatory approval for buying the Norwegian company’s whole business earlier this year, due to US authorities’ concerns about user privacy.
Kunlun Tech said today that they plan to fully exploit the potential of the Opera mobile browser which will be built around a content platform driven by artificial intelligence, but did not specify how and when this would happen.
The Chinese company announced in March that it had invested US$3 million for a 15 percent stake in Kunlun AI, a startup jointly established by Kunlun Tech’s Hong Kong subsidiary and a few undisclosed partners.
Based in Palo Alto, California, Kunlun AI will develop big data and AI-driven corporate solutions in advertising, content recommendations, security and others fields, the company said, describing its work on artificial intelligence "long-term investment".
Opera says its web browser has 277 million mobile users and 51 million desktop users around the world.
Last month it had an 8.6 percent share of mobile users globally, ranking fourth behind Google’s Chrome (40.6 percent), UC Browser (17.9 percent) and Apple’s Safari (17.7 percent), according to StatCounter.
Kunlun Tech plans to generate U$1 billion in net profit by 2020 by using Opera, social networking apps, financial services and the online video and gaming businesses, according to China Daily.
New Chinese owner plans to enhance Opera browser with AI
JANNE SUOKAS
China’s Kunlun Tech announced on Friday that it has completed the acquisition of the web browser Opera. (Photo: Screenshot - Kunlun.com)China’s Kunlun Tech announced on Friday that it has completed the acquisition of the web browser Opera and plans to build it around a content platform driven by artificial intelligence.
Kunlun Tech, a Beijing-based online game company, and five other Chinese internet companies including cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360, jointly acquired the Norwegian online browser firm Opera Software ASA at a final price of US$575 million.
The Chinese consortium – Golden Brick Silk Road fund – now owns Opera’s consumer business, including its flagship mobile and desktop browsers, performance and privacy apps, technology licensing outside Opera TV and a stake in a Chinese joint venture.
Kunlun will get a 33.3 percent stake in the business, and its chairman Zhou Yahui will serve as Opera’s chairman while sharing CEO duties with the company’s original CEO Lars Boilesen, according to Sina Finance (link in Chinese).
Opera’s Mediaworks, Apps & Games, Opera TV, as well as Skyfire video compression technology and Surfeasy VPN software were left out of the deal after the Chinese bidders failed to get regulatory approval for buying the Norwegian company’s whole business earlier this year, due to US authorities’ concerns about user privacy.
Kunlun Tech said today that they plan to fully exploit the potential of the Opera mobile browser which will be built around a content platform driven by artificial intelligence, but did not specify how and when this would happen.
The Chinese company announced in March that it had invested US$3 million for a 15 percent stake in Kunlun AI, a startup jointly established by Kunlun Tech’s Hong Kong subsidiary and a few undisclosed partners.
Based in Palo Alto, California, Kunlun AI will develop big data and AI-driven corporate solutions in advertising, content recommendations, security and others fields, the company said, describing its work on artificial intelligence "long-term investment".
Opera says its web browser has 277 million mobile users and 51 million desktop users around the world.
Last month it had an 8.6 percent share of mobile users globally, ranking fourth behind Google’s Chrome (40.6 percent), UC Browser (17.9 percent) and Apple’s Safari (17.7 percent), according to StatCounter.
Kunlun Tech plans to generate U$1 billion in net profit by 2020 by using Opera, social networking apps, financial services and the online video and gaming businesses, according to China Daily.
Shotgunner51
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China Chases Silicon Valley Talent Who Are Worried About Trump Presidency
by Eric Baculinao
Dec 4 2016, 10:02 am ET
BEIJING — China is trying to capitalize on President-elect Donald Trump's hardline immigration stance and vow to clamp down on a foreign worker visa program that has been used to recruit thousands from overseas to Silicon Valley. Leading tech entrepreneurs, including Robin Li, the billionaire CEO of Baidu, China's largest search engine, see Trump's plans as a huge potential opportunity to lure tech talent away from the United States.
The country already offers incentives of up to $1 million as signing bonuses for those deemed "outstanding" and generous subsidies for start-ups.
Meanwhile, the Washington Post last month reported on comments made by Steve Bannon, who is now the president-elect's chief strategist, during a radio conversation with Trump in Nov. 2015. Bannon, the former Breitbart.com publisher, indicated that he didn't necessarily agree with the idea that foreign talent that goes to school in America should stay in America.
"When two-thirds or three-quarters of the CEOs in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think ...," Bannon said, trailing off. "A country is more than an economy. We're a civic society."
Baidu CEO Robin Li. Imaginechina
Comments like Bannon's and the president-elect's campaign pledges are music to the ears of tech leaders like Li.
"I read that an adviser to President-elect Donald Trump openly complained that three-quarters of CEOs in Silicon Valley are Asian immigrants," the influential entrepreneur said in a recent keynote speech at a state-sponsored conference, a copy of which was provided to NBC News by Baidu.
"Many entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have expressed worries, especially after Trump's election, about the harm to the United States' capabilities in innovation," Li told the audience at China's third annual World Internet Conference.
"I truly hope that these excellent talents from various countries will migrate to China and help China play a more important role on the stage of global innovation."
"I truly hope that these excellent talents from various countries will migrate to China and help China play a more important role on the stage of global innovation."
He added: "I hope everybody will come to China, let's innovate together."
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump tours a Carrier factory with Vice President-elect Mike Pence in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.,
December 1, 2016. MIKE SEGAR / Reuters
As part of the plan for his first 100 days in office, Trump has vowed to prioritize immigration issues and "direct the Department of Labor to investigate all abuses of visa programs that undercut the American worker."
On the campaign trail, he denounced the H-1B visa program, which admits 85,000 foreign skilled workers and graduate students annually — many of whom work in the tech industry and eventually become legal U.S. residents or citizens.
"It's very bad for business … and it's very bad for our workers and it's unfair for our workers. And we should end it," he said.
He sparked more uncertainty by naming Sen. Jeff Sessions, a long-time critic of the skilled-worker visa program, as his pick for attorney general. Sessions has accused tech firms in Silicon Valley of exploiting the program to pass over American labor for foreign workers to cut technology costs.
China's efforts to attract foreign workers has traditionally been hurt by Beijing's web censorship and strict government control of the internet. China has around 700 million internet users — who type a mind-boggling 35 billion words every day, according to the latest survey examining the behavior of the country's netizens.
But Li argued that the "global center of innovation is shifting," describing the world's second-largest economy as the "biggest and fastest growing internet market."
A Baidu spokesperson told NBC News that the company has a program to attract "top-tier talent" in China and abroad, to advance "Baidu's technological leadership in areas including artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning and autonomous diving."
A Baidu sign is seen during the third annual World Internet Conference in Jiaxing, China. ALY SONG / Reuters
Hugo Barra, a Brazilian computer scientist, stunned the technology world in 2013 by leaving his post as Google's vice-president in charge of its Android division to join a private Chinese startup called Xiaomi.
As Xiaomi's international vice-president, Barra has taken charge of global expansion for the smartphone company that has been compared to Apple for its slick marketing and management.
The Beijing-based firm has now become the world's fourth-biggest smartphone maker and is broadening its businesses to mobile apps, laptops and Wi-Fi-enabled consumer electronics.
Analysts have also noted China's emergence as the world's biggest e-commerce market and a leading innovator in mobile services, on the strength of the country's estimated 600 million smartphone users, which is expected to reach 700 million by 2019.
WeChat, China's smash-hit messaging app owned by Tencent, the country's most valuable tech company, has also become a mobile payment giant that is chasing market leader Alipay. The two companies had the lion's share of last year's mobile transactions of $235 billion, pushing China ahead of the U.S. where the market was $231 billion, according to data provider Euromonitor International.
China is also leading the global innovation race. Of the 2.9 million patent applications worldwide in 2015, about 1 million of them came from China. In comparison, 526,000 applications came from the U.S., according to data released by the World Intellectual Property Organization.
Success stories include Dajiang Innovations (DJI) — the world's biggest maker of consumer and small commercial drones. The Chinese start-up boasts three factories in the booming city of Shenzhen, a marketing office in Los Angeles that works with filmmakers, and a Frankfurt office which deals with content partners.
Drones on display at the headquarters of DJI in Shenzhen, China, in April. Stringer / Imaginechina
Paul Pan, DJI's product manager, saw the potential of the company and moved to Shenzhen from Silicon Valley in 2013. During a factory visit last year, he demonstrated to NBC News why DJI was an industry leader. From humble beginnings in a dorm room in 2006, the private company is now valued at over $10 billion.
Shenzhen itself is now widely considered "China's Silicon Valley" and has taken the lead in rolling out a massive subsidy program to attract high-tech talent. The southern city is currently led by Communist Party boss Ma Xingrui, a space scientist and former chief of China's moon mission. His ambition is to make the city a leading innovation hub as it sheds its image as a manufacturer of cheap goods for export.
Shenzhen's recruitment program has attracted 1219 "high-level talents" as of last year, according to Shenzhen Daily newspaper, of which 74 are "foreign experts."
Under a multi-category scheme updated in October last year, the highest incentive for so-called "Outstanding Talent" — a designation open for foreigners from 24 countries, including the United States, if the individual won a Nobel Prize in economics or physics — is an outright lump sum allowance of close to $1 million or 10 years free housing in a 2,200-square-foot apartment.
A lower category, an "Overseas Talent" who starts a business in the city, can receive a subsidy of up to $150,000.
In the past, Chinese companies could only attract Chinese engineers who studied abroad, Baidu's Li lamented.
But he pointed out that Trump's plans have created hope for China to attract "more and more talents from various countries and various nationalities."
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/china/c...ey-talent-who-are-worried-about-trump-n688271
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TaiShang
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China has unique advantages in creating leading AI companies: Kai-Fu Lee
By Ma Danning (People's Daily Online) December 06, 2016
Kai-Fu Lee, founder and CEO of Innovation Works, addresses a seminar headed by Chinese entrepreneurship service platform 36Kr.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the best entrepreneurial opportunity in human history, and China has bountiful advantages in creating world-class AI companies, said Kai-Fu Lee, founder and CEO of technology incubator Innovation Works, venture capitalist and former Google China chief.
"In the next 10 years, most unicorns --- start-up companies valued at over $1 billion --- are bound to be AI companies. The technology will spawn huge market values once incorporated into financial, banking and securities services. Its application in the medical industry, like gene-based treatment and cancer diagnosis, are of great value to humanity,” Lee said on Dec. 6 at a seminar headed by 36Kr, a Chinese entrepreneurship service platform.
At the seminar, he commented that China’s excellent math and science education will provide bountiful brain power to AI development around the country.
“Among all the existing theses in the AI field, 43 percent are written by Chinese people. And we can rapidly train young talents to work in AI—that’s what our entrepreneurial platform, Innovation Works, is doing,” he said.
He noted that many traditional industries in China, including banking systems, still use backward algorithms that lag behind those of Western countries. The adoption of AI algorithms will improve the efficiency of such platforms.
Another reason Lee cited is that all Chinese Internet start-ups valued at over $1 billion, such as Chinese Q&A website Zhihu and leading photo app Meitu, are hiring artificial intelligence experts to update their operations.
“China has more such Internet start-ups than the U.S., and its large Internet user base means huge market potential,” he said. In 2015, the number of Internet users in China reached 780 million, which is 57 percent of the country’s population and twice the U.S. population.
“A few days ago I read an article about a letter a U.S. AI company wrote to President-elect Donald Trump, and it notes that the U.S. must face China’s rise in AI. It calls for more funds to be injected into the AI field in the U.S.,” Lee added.
@Shotgunner51 , @AndrewJin , @terranMarine , @cirr
By Ma Danning (People's Daily Online) December 06, 2016
Kai-Fu Lee, founder and CEO of Innovation Works, addresses a seminar headed by Chinese entrepreneurship service platform 36Kr.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the best entrepreneurial opportunity in human history, and China has bountiful advantages in creating world-class AI companies, said Kai-Fu Lee, founder and CEO of technology incubator Innovation Works, venture capitalist and former Google China chief.
"In the next 10 years, most unicorns --- start-up companies valued at over $1 billion --- are bound to be AI companies. The technology will spawn huge market values once incorporated into financial, banking and securities services. Its application in the medical industry, like gene-based treatment and cancer diagnosis, are of great value to humanity,” Lee said on Dec. 6 at a seminar headed by 36Kr, a Chinese entrepreneurship service platform.
At the seminar, he commented that China’s excellent math and science education will provide bountiful brain power to AI development around the country.
“Among all the existing theses in the AI field, 43 percent are written by Chinese people. And we can rapidly train young talents to work in AI—that’s what our entrepreneurial platform, Innovation Works, is doing,” he said.
He noted that many traditional industries in China, including banking systems, still use backward algorithms that lag behind those of Western countries. The adoption of AI algorithms will improve the efficiency of such platforms.
Another reason Lee cited is that all Chinese Internet start-ups valued at over $1 billion, such as Chinese Q&A website Zhihu and leading photo app Meitu, are hiring artificial intelligence experts to update their operations.
“China has more such Internet start-ups than the U.S., and its large Internet user base means huge market potential,” he said. In 2015, the number of Internet users in China reached 780 million, which is 57 percent of the country’s population and twice the U.S. population.
“A few days ago I read an article about a letter a U.S. AI company wrote to President-elect Donald Trump, and it notes that the U.S. must face China’s rise in AI. It calls for more funds to be injected into the AI field in the U.S.,” Lee added.
@Shotgunner51 , @AndrewJin , @terranMarine , @cirr
ahojunk
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Ex-Microsoft exec gets top Baidu post
2017-01-18 08:27 | China Daily | Editor: Mo Hong'e
Lu Qi (left), president and chief operating officer of Baidu Inc and Robin Li, chairman of Baidu Inc.
(Photo/China Daily)
Search engine giant Baidu Inc has appointed former Microsoft Corp executive Lu Qi its president and chief operating officer, a major push to help the company gain an edge in its latest profit driver－artificial intelligence.
The appointment of the software industry veteran, who was among the few Chinese to hold a senior position in a leading US tech company, also suggested that Chinese tech giants are becoming increasingly attractive to top-notch talent with an international background, an analyst said.
Calling Lu "a leading authority in the area of AI", Baidu Chairman Robin Li said the firm will continue to attract the best global talent as it strives to achieve its goal of becoming the global leader in AI.
Lu will oversee all of Baidu's business units from products, technology to sales and marketing, and report to Li, the company said on Tuesday.
"Lu is likely to attract a number of like-minded talent globally to join the company, which will assist Baidu's further growth," said Zhang Mengmeng, an analyst at Counterpoint Technology Market Research.
Born in Shanghai, Lu holds a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and has more than 40 US patents to his name. He most recently ran Microsoft's applications and services business following an 11-year stint with Yahoo.
Chinese tech companies are becoming a major draw for high-caliber international talent. For example, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd appointed Michael Evans, a former top Goldman Sachs Group Inc executive, president to fulfill its international expansion strategy.
Lu will lend his expertise to the company's AI push, including self-driving cars, after the company launched an augmented reality lab in Beijing in January.
In addition to Lu, Baidu had hired Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng, who specializes in AI, as its chief scientist. It also beefed up its AI talent by building a research center in Silicon Valley.
The search engine provider is looking for new sources of income, after a scandal involving online medical advertisement last year hampered its ad business. Third quarter revenue from online commercials slumped 6.7 percent year-on-year, the first-ever drop since its Nasdaq listing in 2005.
.
2017-01-18 08:27 | China Daily | Editor: Mo Hong'e
Lu Qi (left), president and chief operating officer of Baidu Inc and Robin Li, chairman of Baidu Inc.
(Photo/China Daily)
Search engine giant Baidu Inc has appointed former Microsoft Corp executive Lu Qi its president and chief operating officer, a major push to help the company gain an edge in its latest profit driver－artificial intelligence.
The appointment of the software industry veteran, who was among the few Chinese to hold a senior position in a leading US tech company, also suggested that Chinese tech giants are becoming increasingly attractive to top-notch talent with an international background, an analyst said.
Calling Lu "a leading authority in the area of AI", Baidu Chairman Robin Li said the firm will continue to attract the best global talent as it strives to achieve its goal of becoming the global leader in AI.
Lu will oversee all of Baidu's business units from products, technology to sales and marketing, and report to Li, the company said on Tuesday.
"Lu is likely to attract a number of like-minded talent globally to join the company, which will assist Baidu's further growth," said Zhang Mengmeng, an analyst at Counterpoint Technology Market Research.
Born in Shanghai, Lu holds a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University and has more than 40 US patents to his name. He most recently ran Microsoft's applications and services business following an 11-year stint with Yahoo.
Chinese tech companies are becoming a major draw for high-caliber international talent. For example, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd appointed Michael Evans, a former top Goldman Sachs Group Inc executive, president to fulfill its international expansion strategy.
Lu will lend his expertise to the company's AI push, including self-driving cars, after the company launched an augmented reality lab in Beijing in January.
In addition to Lu, Baidu had hired Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng, who specializes in AI, as its chief scientist. It also beefed up its AI talent by building a research center in Silicon Valley.
The search engine provider is looking for new sources of income, after a scandal involving online medical advertisement last year hampered its ad business. Third quarter revenue from online commercials slumped 6.7 percent year-on-year, the first-ever drop since its Nasdaq listing in 2005.
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Shotgunner51
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40 US patents in his name, he's a super innovative American scientist!
Great addition to Baidu's talent pool, in fact Robin Li has embarked program to attract talents regardless of their background/passport, that's the way to go.
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TaiShang
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A great case of brain regain. Hope more talent lost to the US and others will eventually come home to contribute.
艹艹艹
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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/technology/artificial-intelligence-china-united-states.html?rref=collection/byline/matthew-rosenberg&action=click&contentCollection=undefined®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=collection
China Gains on the U.S. in the Artificial Intelligence Arms Race
By JOHN MARKOFF and MATTHEW ROSENBERGFEB. 3, 2017
The Chinese-designed multicore processor of the Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s fastest supercomputer. The new supercomputer is thought to be part of a broader Chinese push to begin driving innovation.CreditLi Xiang/Xinhua, via Associated Press
Robert O. Work, the veteran defense official retained as deputy secretary by President Trump, calls them his “A.I. dudes.” The breezy moniker belies their serious task: The dudes have been a kitchen cabinet of sorts, and have advised Mr. Work as he has sought to reshape warfare by bringing artificial intelligence to the battlefield.
Last spring, he asked, “O.K., you guys are the smartest guys in A.I., right?”
No, the dudes told him, “the smartest guys are at Facebook and Google,” Mr. Work recalled in an interview.
Now, increasingly, they’re also in China. The United States no longer has a strategic monopoly on the technology, which is widely seen as the key factor in the next generation of warfare.
The Pentagon’s plan to bring A.I. to the military is taking shape as Chinese researchers assert themselves in the nascent technology field. And that shift is reflected in surprising commercial advances in artificial intelligence among Chinese companies.
Last year, for example, Microsoft researchers proclaimed that the company had created software capable of matching human skills in understanding speech.
Although they boasted that they had outperformed their United States competitors, a well-known A.I. researcher who leads a Silicon Valley laboratory for the Chinese web services company Baidu gently tauntedMicrosoft, noting that Baidu had achieved similar accuracy with the Chinese language two years earlier.
That, in a nutshell, is the challenge the United States faces as it embarks on a new military strategy founded on the assumption of its continued superiority in technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.
First announced last year by Ashton B. Carter, President Barack Obama’s defense secretary, the “Third Offset” strategy provides a formula for maintaining a military advantage in the face of a renewed rivalry with China and Russia.
Well into the 1960s, the United States held a military advantage based on technological leadership in nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, that perceived lead shifted to smart weapons, based on brand-new Silicon Valley technologies like computer chips. Now, the nation’s leaders plan on retaining that military advantage with a significant commitment to artificial intelligence and robotic weapons.
But the global technology balance of power is shifting. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the United States carefully guarded its advantage. It led the world in computer and material science technology, and it jealously hoarded its leadership with military secrecy and export controls.
In the late 1980s, the emergence of the inexpensive and universally available microchip upended the Pentagon’s ability to control technological progress. Now, rather than trickling down from military and advanced corporate laboratories, today’s new technologies increasingly come from consumer electronics firms. Put simply, the companies that make the fastest computers are the same ones that put things under our Christmas trees.
As consumer electronics manufacturing has moved to Asia, both Chinese companies and the nation’s government laboratories are making major investments in artificial intelligence.
The advance of the Chinese was underscored last month when Qi Lu, a veteran Microsoft artificial intelligence specialist, left the company to become chief operating officer at Baidu, where he will oversee the company’s ambitious plan to become a global leader in A.I.
And last year, Tencent, developer of the mobile app WeChat, a Facebook competitor, created an artificial intelligence research laboratory and began investing in United States-based A.I. companies.
Rapid Chinese progress has touched off a debate in the United States between military strategists and technologists over whether the Chinese are merely imitating advances or are engaged in independent innovation that will soon overtake the United States in the field.
“The Chinese leadership is increasingly thinking about how to ensure they are competitive in the next wave of technologies,” said Adam Segal, a specialist in emerging technologies and national security at the Council on Foreign Relations.
In August, the state-run China Daily reported that the country had embarked on the development of a cruise missile system with a “high level” of artificial intelligence. The new system appears to be a response to a missile the United States Navy is expected to deploy in 2018 to counter growing Chinese military influence in the Pacific.
Known as the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, or L.R.A.S.M., it is described as a “semiautonomous” weapon. According to the Pentagon, this means that though targets are chosen by human soldiers, the missile uses artificial intelligence technology to avoid defenses and make final targeting decisions.
The new Chinese weapon typifies a strategy known as “remote warfare,” said John Arquilla, a military strategist at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, Calif. The idea is to build large fleets of small ships that deploy missiles, to attack an enemy with larger ships, like aircraft carriers.
“They are making their machines more creative,” he said. “A little bit of automation gives the machines a tremendous boost.”
Whether or not the Chinese will quickly catch the United States in artificial intelligence and robotics technologies is a matter of intense discussion and disagreement in the United States.
Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, said the United States may be too myopic and self-confident to understand the speed of the Chinese competition.
“There are many occasions of something being simultaneously invented in China and elsewhere, or being invented first in China and then later making it overseas,” he said. “But then U.S. media reports only on the U.S. version. This leads to a misperception of those ideas having been first invented in the U.S.”
Photo
Robert O. Work, left, the deputy secretary of defense, with James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, center, and Marcel Lettre, under secretary of defense for intelligence, in November. Mr. Work is trying to bring artificial intelligence to the battlefield. CreditAl Drago/The New York Times
A key example of Chinese progress that goes largely unreported in the United States is Iflytek, an artificial intelligence company that has focused on speech recognition and understanding natural language. The company has won international competitions both in speech synthesis and in translation between Chinese- and English-language texts.
The company, which Chinese technologists said has a close relationship with the government for development of surveillance technology, said it is working with the Ministry of Science and Technology on a “Humanoid Answering Robot.”
“Our goal is to send the machine to attend the college entrance examination, and to be admitted by key national universities in the near future,” said Qingfeng Liu, Iflytek’s chief executive.
The speed of the Chinese technologists, compared to United States and European artificial intelligence developers, is noteworthy. Last April, Gansha Wu, then the director of Intel’s laboratory in China, left his post and began assembling a team of researchers from Intel and Google to build a self-driving car company. Last month, the company, Uisee Technology, met its goal — taking a demonstration to the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas — after just nine months of work.
“The A.I. technologies, including machine vision, sensor fusion, planning and control, on our car are completely home-brewed,” Mr. Wu said. “We wrote every line by ourselves.”
Their first vehicle is intended for controlled environments like college and corporate campuses, with the ultimate goal of designing a shared fleet of autonomous taxis.
The United States’ view of China’s advance may be starting to change. Last October, a White House report on artificial intelligence included several footnotes suggesting that China is now publishing more research than scholars here.
Still, some scientists say the quantity of academic papers does not tell us much about innovation. And there are indications that China has only recently begun to make A.I. a priority in its military systems.
“I think while China is definitely making progress in A.I. systems, it is nowhere close to matching the U.S.,” said Abhijit Singh, a former Indian military officer who is now a naval weapons analyst at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
Chinese researchers who are directly involved in artificial intelligence work in China have a very different view.
“It is indisputable that Chinese authors are a significant force in A.I., and their position has been increasing drastically in the past five years,” said Kai-Fu Lee, a Taiwanese-born artificial intelligence researcher who played a key role in establishing both Microsoft’s and Google’s China-based research laboratories.
Mr. Lee, now a venture capitalist who invests in both China and the United States, acknowledged that the United States is still the global leader but believes that the gap has drastically narrowed. His firm, Sinovation Ventures, has recently raised $675 million to invest in A.I. both in the United States and in China.
“Using a chess analogy,” he said, “we might say that grandmasters are still largely North American, but Chinese occupy increasingly greater portions of the master-level A.I. scientists.”
What is not in dispute is that the close ties between Silicon Valley and China both in terms of investment and research, and the open nature of much of the American A.I. research community, has made the most advanced technology easily available to China.
In addition to setting up research outposts such as Baidu’s Silicon Valley A.I. Laboratory, Chinese citizens, including government employees, routinely audit Stanford University artificial intelligence courses.
One Stanford professor, Richard Socher, said it was easy to spot the Chinese nationals because after the first few weeks, his students would often skip class, choosing instead to view videos of the lectures. The Chinese auditors, on the other hand, would continue to attend, taking their seats at the front of the classroom.
Artificial intelligence is only one part of the tech frontier where China is advancing rapidly.
Last year, China also brought the world’s fastest supercomputer, theSunway TaihuLight, online, supplanting another Chinese model that had been the world’s fastest. The new supercomputer is thought to be part of a broader Chinese push to begin driving innovation, a shift from its role as a manufacturing hub for components and devices designed in the United States and elsewhere.
In a reflection of the desire to become a center of innovation, the processors in the new computer are of a native Chinese design. The earlier supercomputer, the Tianhe 2, was powered by Intel’s Xeon processors; after it came online, the United States banned further export of the chips to China, in hopes of limiting the Chinese push into supercomputing.
The new supercomputer, like similar machines anywhere in the world, has a variety of uses, and does not by itself represent a direct military challenge. It can be used to model climate change situations, for instance, or to perform analysis of large data sets.
But similar advances in high-performance computing being made by the Chinese could be used to push ahead with machine-learning research, which would have military applications, along with more typical defense functions, such as simulating nuclear weapons tests or breaking the encryption used by adversaries.
Moreover, while there appear to be relatively cozy relationships between the Chinese government and commercial technology efforts, the same cannot be said about the United States. The Pentagon recently restarted its beachhead in Silicon Valley, known as the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental facility, or DIUx. It is an attempt to rethink bureaucratic United States government contracting practices in terms of the faster and more fluid style of Silicon Valley.
The government has not yet undone the damage to its relationship with the Valley brought about by Edward J. Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices. Many Silicon Valley firms remain hesitant to be seen as working too closely with the Pentagon out of fear of losing access to China’s market.
“There are smaller companies, the companies who sort of decided that they’re going to be in the defense business, like a Palantir,” said Peter W. Singer, an expert in the future of war at New America, a think tank in Washington, referring to the Palo Alto, Calif., start-up founded in part by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel. “But if you’re thinking about the big, iconic tech companies, they can’t become defense contractors and still expect to get access to the Chinese market.”
Those concerns are real for Silicon Valley.
“No one sort of overtly says that, because the Pentagon can’t say it’s about China, and the tech companies can’t,” Mr. Singer said. “But it’s there in the background.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2017, on Page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: China’s Intelligent Weaponry Gets Smarter. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
China Gains on the U.S. in the Artificial Intelligence Arms Race
By JOHN MARKOFF and MATTHEW ROSENBERGFEB. 3, 2017
The Chinese-designed multicore processor of the Sunway TaihuLight, the world’s fastest supercomputer. The new supercomputer is thought to be part of a broader Chinese push to begin driving innovation.CreditLi Xiang/Xinhua, via Associated Press
Robert O. Work, the veteran defense official retained as deputy secretary by President Trump, calls them his “A.I. dudes.” The breezy moniker belies their serious task: The dudes have been a kitchen cabinet of sorts, and have advised Mr. Work as he has sought to reshape warfare by bringing artificial intelligence to the battlefield.
Last spring, he asked, “O.K., you guys are the smartest guys in A.I., right?”
No, the dudes told him, “the smartest guys are at Facebook and Google,” Mr. Work recalled in an interview.
Now, increasingly, they’re also in China. The United States no longer has a strategic monopoly on the technology, which is widely seen as the key factor in the next generation of warfare.
The Pentagon’s plan to bring A.I. to the military is taking shape as Chinese researchers assert themselves in the nascent technology field. And that shift is reflected in surprising commercial advances in artificial intelligence among Chinese companies.
Last year, for example, Microsoft researchers proclaimed that the company had created software capable of matching human skills in understanding speech.
Although they boasted that they had outperformed their United States competitors, a well-known A.I. researcher who leads a Silicon Valley laboratory for the Chinese web services company Baidu gently tauntedMicrosoft, noting that Baidu had achieved similar accuracy with the Chinese language two years earlier.
That, in a nutshell, is the challenge the United States faces as it embarks on a new military strategy founded on the assumption of its continued superiority in technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence.
First announced last year by Ashton B. Carter, President Barack Obama’s defense secretary, the “Third Offset” strategy provides a formula for maintaining a military advantage in the face of a renewed rivalry with China and Russia.
Well into the 1960s, the United States held a military advantage based on technological leadership in nuclear weapons. In the 1970s, that perceived lead shifted to smart weapons, based on brand-new Silicon Valley technologies like computer chips. Now, the nation’s leaders plan on retaining that military advantage with a significant commitment to artificial intelligence and robotic weapons.
But the global technology balance of power is shifting. From the 1950s through the 1980s, the United States carefully guarded its advantage. It led the world in computer and material science technology, and it jealously hoarded its leadership with military secrecy and export controls.
In the late 1980s, the emergence of the inexpensive and universally available microchip upended the Pentagon’s ability to control technological progress. Now, rather than trickling down from military and advanced corporate laboratories, today’s new technologies increasingly come from consumer electronics firms. Put simply, the companies that make the fastest computers are the same ones that put things under our Christmas trees.
As consumer electronics manufacturing has moved to Asia, both Chinese companies and the nation’s government laboratories are making major investments in artificial intelligence.
The advance of the Chinese was underscored last month when Qi Lu, a veteran Microsoft artificial intelligence specialist, left the company to become chief operating officer at Baidu, where he will oversee the company’s ambitious plan to become a global leader in A.I.
And last year, Tencent, developer of the mobile app WeChat, a Facebook competitor, created an artificial intelligence research laboratory and began investing in United States-based A.I. companies.
Rapid Chinese progress has touched off a debate in the United States between military strategists and technologists over whether the Chinese are merely imitating advances or are engaged in independent innovation that will soon overtake the United States in the field.
“The Chinese leadership is increasingly thinking about how to ensure they are competitive in the next wave of technologies,” said Adam Segal, a specialist in emerging technologies and national security at the Council on Foreign Relations.
In August, the state-run China Daily reported that the country had embarked on the development of a cruise missile system with a “high level” of artificial intelligence. The new system appears to be a response to a missile the United States Navy is expected to deploy in 2018 to counter growing Chinese military influence in the Pacific.
Known as the Long Range Anti-Ship Missile, or L.R.A.S.M., it is described as a “semiautonomous” weapon. According to the Pentagon, this means that though targets are chosen by human soldiers, the missile uses artificial intelligence technology to avoid defenses and make final targeting decisions.
The new Chinese weapon typifies a strategy known as “remote warfare,” said John Arquilla, a military strategist at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, Calif. The idea is to build large fleets of small ships that deploy missiles, to attack an enemy with larger ships, like aircraft carriers.
“They are making their machines more creative,” he said. “A little bit of automation gives the machines a tremendous boost.”
Whether or not the Chinese will quickly catch the United States in artificial intelligence and robotics technologies is a matter of intense discussion and disagreement in the United States.
Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, said the United States may be too myopic and self-confident to understand the speed of the Chinese competition.
“There are many occasions of something being simultaneously invented in China and elsewhere, or being invented first in China and then later making it overseas,” he said. “But then U.S. media reports only on the U.S. version. This leads to a misperception of those ideas having been first invented in the U.S.”
Photo
Robert O. Work, left, the deputy secretary of defense, with James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, center, and Marcel Lettre, under secretary of defense for intelligence, in November. Mr. Work is trying to bring artificial intelligence to the battlefield. CreditAl Drago/The New York Times
A key example of Chinese progress that goes largely unreported in the United States is Iflytek, an artificial intelligence company that has focused on speech recognition and understanding natural language. The company has won international competitions both in speech synthesis and in translation between Chinese- and English-language texts.
The company, which Chinese technologists said has a close relationship with the government for development of surveillance technology, said it is working with the Ministry of Science and Technology on a “Humanoid Answering Robot.”
“Our goal is to send the machine to attend the college entrance examination, and to be admitted by key national universities in the near future,” said Qingfeng Liu, Iflytek’s chief executive.
The speed of the Chinese technologists, compared to United States and European artificial intelligence developers, is noteworthy. Last April, Gansha Wu, then the director of Intel’s laboratory in China, left his post and began assembling a team of researchers from Intel and Google to build a self-driving car company. Last month, the company, Uisee Technology, met its goal — taking a demonstration to the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas — after just nine months of work.
“The A.I. technologies, including machine vision, sensor fusion, planning and control, on our car are completely home-brewed,” Mr. Wu said. “We wrote every line by ourselves.”
Their first vehicle is intended for controlled environments like college and corporate campuses, with the ultimate goal of designing a shared fleet of autonomous taxis.
The United States’ view of China’s advance may be starting to change. Last October, a White House report on artificial intelligence included several footnotes suggesting that China is now publishing more research than scholars here.
Still, some scientists say the quantity of academic papers does not tell us much about innovation. And there are indications that China has only recently begun to make A.I. a priority in its military systems.
“I think while China is definitely making progress in A.I. systems, it is nowhere close to matching the U.S.,” said Abhijit Singh, a former Indian military officer who is now a naval weapons analyst at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
Chinese researchers who are directly involved in artificial intelligence work in China have a very different view.
“It is indisputable that Chinese authors are a significant force in A.I., and their position has been increasing drastically in the past five years,” said Kai-Fu Lee, a Taiwanese-born artificial intelligence researcher who played a key role in establishing both Microsoft’s and Google’s China-based research laboratories.
Mr. Lee, now a venture capitalist who invests in both China and the United States, acknowledged that the United States is still the global leader but believes that the gap has drastically narrowed. His firm, Sinovation Ventures, has recently raised $675 million to invest in A.I. both in the United States and in China.
“Using a chess analogy,” he said, “we might say that grandmasters are still largely North American, but Chinese occupy increasingly greater portions of the master-level A.I. scientists.”
What is not in dispute is that the close ties between Silicon Valley and China both in terms of investment and research, and the open nature of much of the American A.I. research community, has made the most advanced technology easily available to China.
In addition to setting up research outposts such as Baidu’s Silicon Valley A.I. Laboratory, Chinese citizens, including government employees, routinely audit Stanford University artificial intelligence courses.
One Stanford professor, Richard Socher, said it was easy to spot the Chinese nationals because after the first few weeks, his students would often skip class, choosing instead to view videos of the lectures. The Chinese auditors, on the other hand, would continue to attend, taking their seats at the front of the classroom.
Artificial intelligence is only one part of the tech frontier where China is advancing rapidly.
Last year, China also brought the world’s fastest supercomputer, theSunway TaihuLight, online, supplanting another Chinese model that had been the world’s fastest. The new supercomputer is thought to be part of a broader Chinese push to begin driving innovation, a shift from its role as a manufacturing hub for components and devices designed in the United States and elsewhere.
In a reflection of the desire to become a center of innovation, the processors in the new computer are of a native Chinese design. The earlier supercomputer, the Tianhe 2, was powered by Intel’s Xeon processors; after it came online, the United States banned further export of the chips to China, in hopes of limiting the Chinese push into supercomputing.
The new supercomputer, like similar machines anywhere in the world, has a variety of uses, and does not by itself represent a direct military challenge. It can be used to model climate change situations, for instance, or to perform analysis of large data sets.
But similar advances in high-performance computing being made by the Chinese could be used to push ahead with machine-learning research, which would have military applications, along with more typical defense functions, such as simulating nuclear weapons tests or breaking the encryption used by adversaries.
Moreover, while there appear to be relatively cozy relationships between the Chinese government and commercial technology efforts, the same cannot be said about the United States. The Pentagon recently restarted its beachhead in Silicon Valley, known as the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental facility, or DIUx. It is an attempt to rethink bureaucratic United States government contracting practices in terms of the faster and more fluid style of Silicon Valley.
The government has not yet undone the damage to its relationship with the Valley brought about by Edward J. Snowden’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s surveillance practices. Many Silicon Valley firms remain hesitant to be seen as working too closely with the Pentagon out of fear of losing access to China’s market.
“There are smaller companies, the companies who sort of decided that they’re going to be in the defense business, like a Palantir,” said Peter W. Singer, an expert in the future of war at New America, a think tank in Washington, referring to the Palo Alto, Calif., start-up founded in part by the venture capitalist Peter Thiel. “But if you’re thinking about the big, iconic tech companies, they can’t become defense contractors and still expect to get access to the Chinese market.”
Those concerns are real for Silicon Valley.
“No one sort of overtly says that, because the Pentagon can’t say it’s about China, and the tech companies can’t,” Mr. Singer said. “But it’s there in the background.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 5, 2017, on Page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: China’s Intelligent Weaponry Gets Smarter. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
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China’s Intelligent Weaponry Gets Smarter
Excellent read in NYT about China's growing know-how. Of particular interest is the amusing quote from an indian "expert". He so wants to believe in the backwardness of China with respects to the USA.
“I think while China is definitely making progress in A.I. systems, it is nowhere close to matching the U.S.,” said Abhijit Singh, a former Indian military officer who is now a naval weapons analyst at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
Excellent read in NYT about China's growing know-how. Of particular interest is the amusing quote from an indian "expert". He so wants to believe in the backwardness of China with respects to the USA.
“I think while China is definitely making progress in A.I. systems, it is nowhere close to matching the U.S.,” said Abhijit Singh, a former Indian military officer who is now a naval weapons analyst at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi.
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FEB 13, 2017 @ 12:02 AM
How Chinese Internet Giant Baidu Uses AI And Machine Learning
Bernard Marr , CONTRIBUTOR
I write about big data, analytics and enterprise performance
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Baidu is currently considered to be pack leader amongst the Chinese internet giants as they race to develop and deploy machine and deep learning technology. Much like their US-based counterparts such as Google and Amazon, self-teaching, neural net technology is being integrated into both their core services and used to innovate in new ways.
Cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI) methods such as machine learning and deep learning are being used to reap huge benefits across industries as diverse as finance and healthcare. The basic idea is that once we teach computers to learn in the same way we do, they can absorb and process Big Data at a tremendous rate, soon becoming at least, if not more, reliable than humans when it comes to making decisions.
The work of the Chinese giants – most prominently Baidu but also online retailer Ali Baba and chat provider Tencent - in the AI field has received relatively little coverage in western media compared to that afforded to the US giants. This is starting to change as Chinese service providers increasingly look overseas for new customers, and will increasingly spend money to market themselves as global entities. Chinese internet companies are also increasingly physically locating themselves in western markets – particularly Silicon Valley – primarily to take advantage of the local analytics and data talent. So, I thought it would be interesting to focus on one of them for this piece.
Baidu’s work in the field of machine learning and AI is coordinated by Baidu Research, which is headed by chief scientist Andrew Ng. Before he joined Baidu, Ng was a director of Stanford University’s AI lab, and then founder of the team which developed Google Brain.
Like Google, the US giant which it is most frequently compared to, Baidu has invested in research and development across just about every currently fashionable arm of AI – from automated personal assistants, to autonomous cars and healthcare.
Baidu logo at the Baidu headquarters in Beijing (Photo GREG BAKER/AFP/Getty Images)
Before I go over some of their use cases, though, one thing that is worth considering is one potential advantage that Baidu has over its competitors. China’s stricter rules on use of the internet means that most citizens don’t have (legal) access to Google or many western online services – meaning Google knows very little about them. Chinese firms such as Baudu and Alibaba, on the other hand – as well as a monopoly on gathering personal data in their home market - can collect data of US and EU consumers in the overseas markets in which they operate. Given China’s huge population, it’s clear that Baidu is in an advantageous position here, when it comes to Big Data projects involving huge scale behavioural datasets. On top of this, China’s rules and regulations around transferring and selling personal data are generally considered to be less robust than those of the US or EU. This means huge amounts of “grey market” data is available to Chinese countries for very little cost.
AI as a service
Like Google, Baidu’s core service is also search – Baidu is said to account for 75% of search traffic in its homeland. Here, it has rolled out machine learning algorithms for voice and image recognition, as well as natural language processing, to help it return smarter, more useful and more personalized results.
Baidu also makes its technology available to third parties such as other companies which want to benefit from the AI revolution but don’t have the resources to develop their own algorithms and applications. Much of its software and systems have been made open source and it also provides access to its technology on an “as-a-service” basis. Businesses and organizations can use Baidu’s systems to host their own data and run their own analytics projects in the cloud, paying only for the storage and computing resources which they use.
Another recently unveiled initiative at Baidu is the integration of its machine learning with its ongoing innovation in augmented reality (AR). Mostly it seems this work is currently focused on marketing, such as AR advertising campaigns created for Baidu customers such as KFC and L’Oreal. However, it has also begun the process of using AR to restore, virtually, important historic monuments (specifically, Beijing’s nine ancient city gates). As well as allowing visitors to the sites to see the structures as they would have looked before time and the modern age took their toll, the technology is being built into Baidu’s search functionality, much as Google has done with its Google Maps services, to make it available anywhere.
In healthcare, the Baidu Doctor project is focused around applying machine and deep learning to building a chat program that can reliably diagnose illness just like a human doctor, simply from the patient’s voice input. The company has stated that it’s long term goal is to create a “medical robot” – a concept familiar to science fiction fans which is now, thanks to advances in machine learning, tantalisingly close to becoming a reality.
It’s current application is known as Melody, and is designed to act as a “medical assistant”, rather than a replacement for a doctor. So a doctor will rely on it to provide advice and assistance (and hopefully not spend too much time worrying that it is going to steal his or her job.) Ng has stated that the AI will continue to learn more and become a more efficient medical practitioner as it gains more and more real-world experience.
In the home, Baidu is attempting to tackle Amazon’s Alexa head on with its Xiaoyu Zaikia (Little Fish) home robot – which unlike Amazon’s system is capable of turning its “head” to listen to whoever is speaking to it. Users can control smart home equipment and order goods online using its natural language processing interface.
Autonomous vehicles
In another strategy heavily mirroring its US competitors, Baidu has put significant work into developing autonomous and self-driving vehicles for the consumer market. The company has said that it is planning to begin mass production of driverless cars by 2021. Testing began last year in China and the US. Unlike models showcased by competitors, which include tech and auto industry giants such as Google, Uber, BMW and Ford, the current Baidu cars use a rotating roof-mounted sensor array. This constantly-spinning device builds a digital model of what is going on in the car’s immediate environment. This model is then analyzed in-car by machine learning algorithms to determine the best and safest route to its destination
Overall Baidu has shown itself to be a real innovator when it comes to AI and machine learning, and has been willing to invest serious money, as well as give back to the field through open sourcing the fruits of its labor. This forward-thinking approach is likely to be a crucial advantage as the company continues to seek greater recognition outside of its home country, and establish itself as a truly global leader.
Bernard Marr is a best-selling author & keynote speaker on business, technology and the effective use of data.
How Chinese Internet Giant Baidu Uses AI And Machine Learning
Bernard Marr , CONTRIBUTOR
I write about big data, analytics and enterprise performance
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Baidu is currently considered to be pack leader amongst the Chinese internet giants as they race to develop and deploy machine and deep learning technology. Much like their US-based counterparts such as Google and Amazon, self-teaching, neural net technology is being integrated into both their core services and used to innovate in new ways.
Cutting edge artificial intelligence (AI) methods such as machine learning and deep learning are being used to reap huge benefits across industries as diverse as finance and healthcare. The basic idea is that once we teach computers to learn in the same way we do, they can absorb and process Big Data at a tremendous rate, soon becoming at least, if not more, reliable than humans when it comes to making decisions.
The work of the Chinese giants – most prominently Baidu but also online retailer Ali Baba and chat provider Tencent - in the AI field has received relatively little coverage in western media compared to that afforded to the US giants. This is starting to change as Chinese service providers increasingly look overseas for new customers, and will increasingly spend money to market themselves as global entities. Chinese internet companies are also increasingly physically locating themselves in western markets – particularly Silicon Valley – primarily to take advantage of the local analytics and data talent. So, I thought it would be interesting to focus on one of them for this piece.
Baidu’s work in the field of machine learning and AI is coordinated by Baidu Research, which is headed by chief scientist Andrew Ng. Before he joined Baidu, Ng was a director of Stanford University’s AI lab, and then founder of the team which developed Google Brain.
Like Google, the US giant which it is most frequently compared to, Baidu has invested in research and development across just about every currently fashionable arm of AI – from automated personal assistants, to autonomous cars and healthcare.
Baidu logo at the Baidu headquarters in Beijing (Photo GREG BAKER/AFP/Getty Images)
Before I go over some of their use cases, though, one thing that is worth considering is one potential advantage that Baidu has over its competitors. China’s stricter rules on use of the internet means that most citizens don’t have (legal) access to Google or many western online services – meaning Google knows very little about them. Chinese firms such as Baudu and Alibaba, on the other hand – as well as a monopoly on gathering personal data in their home market - can collect data of US and EU consumers in the overseas markets in which they operate. Given China’s huge population, it’s clear that Baidu is in an advantageous position here, when it comes to Big Data projects involving huge scale behavioural datasets. On top of this, China’s rules and regulations around transferring and selling personal data are generally considered to be less robust than those of the US or EU. This means huge amounts of “grey market” data is available to Chinese countries for very little cost.
AI as a service
Like Google, Baidu’s core service is also search – Baidu is said to account for 75% of search traffic in its homeland. Here, it has rolled out machine learning algorithms for voice and image recognition, as well as natural language processing, to help it return smarter, more useful and more personalized results.
Baidu also makes its technology available to third parties such as other companies which want to benefit from the AI revolution but don’t have the resources to develop their own algorithms and applications. Much of its software and systems have been made open source and it also provides access to its technology on an “as-a-service” basis. Businesses and organizations can use Baidu’s systems to host their own data and run their own analytics projects in the cloud, paying only for the storage and computing resources which they use.
Another recently unveiled initiative at Baidu is the integration of its machine learning with its ongoing innovation in augmented reality (AR). Mostly it seems this work is currently focused on marketing, such as AR advertising campaigns created for Baidu customers such as KFC and L’Oreal. However, it has also begun the process of using AR to restore, virtually, important historic monuments (specifically, Beijing’s nine ancient city gates). As well as allowing visitors to the sites to see the structures as they would have looked before time and the modern age took their toll, the technology is being built into Baidu’s search functionality, much as Google has done with its Google Maps services, to make it available anywhere.
In healthcare, the Baidu Doctor project is focused around applying machine and deep learning to building a chat program that can reliably diagnose illness just like a human doctor, simply from the patient’s voice input. The company has stated that it’s long term goal is to create a “medical robot” – a concept familiar to science fiction fans which is now, thanks to advances in machine learning, tantalisingly close to becoming a reality.
It’s current application is known as Melody, and is designed to act as a “medical assistant”, rather than a replacement for a doctor. So a doctor will rely on it to provide advice and assistance (and hopefully not spend too much time worrying that it is going to steal his or her job.) Ng has stated that the AI will continue to learn more and become a more efficient medical practitioner as it gains more and more real-world experience.
In the home, Baidu is attempting to tackle Amazon’s Alexa head on with its Xiaoyu Zaikia (Little Fish) home robot – which unlike Amazon’s system is capable of turning its “head” to listen to whoever is speaking to it. Users can control smart home equipment and order goods online using its natural language processing interface.
Autonomous vehicles
In another strategy heavily mirroring its US competitors, Baidu has put significant work into developing autonomous and self-driving vehicles for the consumer market. The company has said that it is planning to begin mass production of driverless cars by 2021. Testing began last year in China and the US. Unlike models showcased by competitors, which include tech and auto industry giants such as Google, Uber, BMW and Ford, the current Baidu cars use a rotating roof-mounted sensor array. This constantly-spinning device builds a digital model of what is going on in the car’s immediate environment. This model is then analyzed in-car by machine learning algorithms to determine the best and safest route to its destination
Overall Baidu has shown itself to be a real innovator when it comes to AI and machine learning, and has been willing to invest serious money, as well as give back to the field through open sourcing the fruits of its labor. This forward-thinking approach is likely to be a crucial advantage as the company continues to seek greater recognition outside of its home country, and establish itself as a truly global leader.
Bernard Marr is a best-selling author & keynote speaker on business, technology and the effective use of data.
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