Interview With CEO Robin Li on Baidu's (and China's) Goal Of Ruling Artificial Intelligence
From Wired:
Inside Baidu’s Bid to Lead the AI Revolution
Presumably, Robin Li wanted attention last summer when
he decided to launch Baidu’s bid for the future of self-driving cars
from the front seat of a car that was driving itself. He wanted to draw
attention to Apollo, the company’s new set of artificial
intelligence-driven tools, which Li hopes will come to power vehicles
everywhere. Having launched China’s dominant search engine, Li is a
celebrity in his home country. But even Li didn’t anticipate the amount
of attention he would get. Automated motoring is still very much
forbidden in China, and Li was livestreaming a video that showed him
breaking the law. That’s how he became the subject of his own viral
video. “I didn’t realize it would catch a lot of attention because it’s
not really allowed to have a self-driving car,” he says now.
He can laugh about this now, three months after the fact, as we
review the experience from top floor of Baidu’s old headquarters, a
seven-floor building in Beijing’s Haidian District. A newer, larger
building, complete with a two-story slide in the lobby and a conference
room shaped like a bear claw, is just a 15-minute drive away—neighbors,
by Beijing standards. In both, employee identification badges have been
replaced by facial recognition technology. Order a green tea from the
vending machine, and you can pay for it by looking at a camera. These
futuristic campuses offer a glimpse at the scope of the computing power
the company has amassed.
I traveled to Beijing to chronicle this
tenuous moment in Baidu’s history. At 18 years old, Baidu has built the
country’s dominant search engine, a business substantial enough to make
it one of the most important tech companies in all of China. And yet:
It’s hard to be a Chinese search company in 2017, when Chinese people
increasingly navigate the web through apps, not via a browser. As WeChat
and Alibaba deftly transformed their companies to suit mobile, Baidu
missed this shift. It has been struggling to catch up ever since. To
ascend to future dominance, Baidu needs to find a new way to grow—and
fast. Fortunately, the world has provided Li with just such an
opportunity: “the era of artificial intelligence,” he tells me. Li is
betting Baidu’s future on the promise that he can own the future of
artificial intelligence, in Asia and beyond.
So
far, North American companies have been earlier to invest in AI, and
first to introduce both the new technologies and the resulting products.
Many of AI’s most forward-thinking researchers are in Silicon Valley or
Canada. The large US tech companies were first with everything from the
technologies that will enable self-driving cars to smart speakers such
as Google Home and Amazon Echo.
But Li has reasons for thinking
that there are advantages for a company trying to stake claim to AI in
Asia—even as an underdog. It’s still not clear how artificial
intelligence will reshape our lives, but it is clear that the change is
coming. And those best positioned to deliver that change—and reap the
spoils it will inevitably introduce—are those that master and advance
the underlying technology. That’s where Baidu is competitive. Like
America’s Big Five, Baidu has substantial computing brawn, a suite of
AI-powered services called Baidu Brain, and a fast-improving voice
assistant platform called DuerOS. “We are one of the few companies who
have the capability to develop this type of technology,” says Li.
Baidu’s biggest advantage is
one of place and time. Li is introducing his strategy within a culture
that has few ethical hang-ups around AI development. In the West, where
people are concerned about the biases with which we program our
algorithms and the speed at which they’ll disrupt traditional career
paths, new technology emerges more slowly. In China, it’s the reverse:
There’s public pressure for companies to move as fast as possible. In
July, the Chinese government issued a development plan that aims to make
it the world leader in AI by 2030. Then there’s the raw fuel that
powers the algorithms: data. There are close to 731 million people
online in China, well more than double the number of connected
Americans. When those millions search and watch videos and make
payments, they leave a digital trail of information powerful enough to
make any AI researcher salivate.
All of this means that China is
poised to be a hotbed of AI development in the near future. Li believes
he’s setting Baidu on course to own this next revolution—one that, in
turn, will vault Baidu to its rightful place in the stratosphere. Soon,
Li intones, his company will deliver the AI technology that infuses
everything and every system—from medicine to entertainment to cars—with
intelligence. “In human history, humans invented tools, and then had to
learn how to use them,” Li tells me. “In the future, devices will need
to learn human.”
It’s a revolution that Li can’t afford to blunder. After all, he missed the last one. In China, people often talk
about the singular controlling power of the BAT: the three companies
that control the technology industry. Along with Alibaba and Tencent,
they’re talking about Baidu. Li launched the company after a tour in the
United States. He’d gotten his masters in computer science from the
University of New York at Buffalo, and he spent two years as a staff
engineer at Infoseek. Upon his return, he and cofounder Eric Xu built
Baidu into the biggest search engine in China, and took the company
public in 2005....MUCH MORE
