From Bloomberg, March 16, 2017:
The Chinese company has more than 1,300 people working on tech like deep learning.
On Dec. 6, 2016, thousands of translators filed into office buildings
across mainland China to pore over brochures, letters, and technical
manuals, all in foreign languages, painstakingly rendering their texts
in Chinese characters. This marathon carried on for 15 hours a day for
an entire month. Clients that supplied the material received
professional-grade Chinese versions of the originals at a bargain price.
But Baidu Inc., the Beijing-based company that organized the mass
translation, got something potentially more valuable: millions of
English-Mandarin word pairs with which to train its online translation
engine.
China is infamous for its knockoffs, whether luxury
handbags or web startups. But the country’s leadership seems to
understand that when it comes to artificial intelligence, cheap
imitations just won’t do—not when its rivals include Alphabet, Facebook,
IBM, and Microsoft. In February the National Development and Reform
Commission appointed Baidu—often described as the Google of China—to
lead a new AI lab, signaling that Beijing believes the company has the
makings of a national champion in this sphere.
Of the more than 20
billion yuan ($2.9 billion) Baidu has spent on research and development
over the past two and a half years, most has been on AI, according to
comments co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Robin Li made at the
lab’s launch last month. But China’s national interest isn’t his main
motivation: Baidu’s revenue growth fell to about 6 percent last year,
from an average of more than 30 percent over the prior three years. The
search ad business, which contributed the lion’s share of its 70.5
billion yuan in sales in the fiscal year ended on Dec. 31, is under
siege from local rivals. A September report from EMarketer Inc. noted
that Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. had overtaken Baidu to become the leader
in China’s digital ad market. Baidu hopes AI can help it reclaim share
in search, as well as ensure success in newer ventures.
That’s key as the 17-year-old company’s attempts at diversification
have produced mixed results. The number of daily visitors to its group
buying site, Nuomi, dropped 59 percent in the 12 months through February
2017; its Waimai food delivery service lags in third place, according
to Natalie Wu, an analyst with China International Capital Corp. The
Netflix-like streaming video service iQiyi.com is hugely popular, but it
will take 12 billion yuan to keep it stocked with content this year,
estimates analyst Ella Ji with China Renaissance Securities (Hong Kong )
Ltd.
Those faltering efforts mean Baidu’s push into AI is taking
on greater importance. “The era of mobile internet has ended,” said Li
in a March 10 interview. “We’re going to aggressively invest in AI, and I
think it’s going to benefit a lot of people and transform industry
after industry.”
In January the company named former Microsoft
Corp. executive Qi Lu as its chief operating officer, with a mandate to
reshape the company around such technologies as deep learning, augmented
reality, and image recognition. He joins Chief Scientist Andrew Ng, a
Stanford academic who worked on Alphabet Inc.’s deep learning group
before decamping to Baidu in 2014. Under Ng’s watch, the company’s AI
team, which is scattered across research labs in Beijing, Shenzhen,
Shanghai, and Sunnyvale, Calif., has grown to 1,300 and is expected to
increase by several hundred more hires this year. “A ton of stuff is
invented in China, and a ton of stuff is invented in the U.S.,” says Ng,
who’s based in Silicon Valley. “By having people in both countries, we
see the latest trends.”
On the day in May 2014 that the Sunnyvale research center
opened, Ng and his top lieutenant, Adam Coates, sat down in front of a
blank whiteboard to identify their first project. After drawing up a
list of possibilities (and challenges), they settled on speech
recognition as a foundation on which they could build a series of other
offerings.
By mid-2015, the 50-person team had a product called
Deep Speech that could decipher much of what was said in English. Rather
than picking apart phrases word by word, the software parsed through
vast reams of language data and then extrapolated patterns, a process
known as deep learning. The system could transcribe speech more
accurately than traditional engines that rely on vocabulary lists and
phonetic dictionaries, Ng says, because it took into account a word’s
context to determine its meaning.
One thing that consistently tripped it up, though, were words
and names that had over time crept into the English lexicon from other
languages. “If you want to say ‘Play music by Tchaikovsky,’ the software
would return answers like ‘Play music and try cough ski,’ ” says
Coates, whom Ng recruited from Stanford. “We literally dubbed it the
Tchaikovsky Problem.”
Instead of simply adding “Tchaikovsky” to
the system’s vocabulary list, Baidu’s programmers had to help Deep
Speech teach itself to understand the word. That involved pumping in
even more data to help the system put things in context.
Shiqi Zhao, the Beijing-based associate director of Baidu’s natural
language processing department, recalls that as a computer science
student at China’s Harbin Institute of Technology he had only 2 million
word pairs of English-to-Chinese terms to play with while working on
computer-based translation; Baidu has about 100 million. However, that’s
still far fewer than Alphabet’s 500 million, according to a 2016
article in Science magazine that featured one of the U.S. company’s research scientists, Quoc V. Le.
To
help close the gap, Baidu has resorted to an age-old tactic: throw lots
of people at the problem....MORE
