Driving The AI Revolution

In 1992, when Robin Li applied to a computing graduate-school program in the United States, the interviewing professor asked him: “Do you have computers in China?” The question left Li stunned. From this, he vowed to demonstrate that China has a powerful computer industry.

- Ong Xiang Hong

And that is exactly what he did. In 2000, Li founded Baidu. It grew into a search engine that is second only to Google in popularity worldwide. Its market share of 80 per cent makes it the world’s fourth most popular website. Valued at US$60 billion, its presence in China is rivalled only by fellow behemoths Alibaba and Tencent. Aside from search results, Baidu Maps directs every motorist in China, Baidu Baike rivals English Wikipedia for sheer encyclopaedic content, and Baidu Fanyi allegedly provides more accurate translation than Google’s competing Translate service.

While Baidu may be seen by many as a cheap knockoff of Google, its progress now has Mountain View losing sleep. Baidu’s offerings are now arguably more polished and more innovative than Google’s, but available only in China. Furthermore, with the best brains in China working for its AI project, Baidu has set its sights on computing’s next frontier – intelligence equal to that of a human. Some US$1.2 billion of Baidu’s US$9 billion revenue over the first three-quarters of 2017 was put back into R&D, according to published accounts – much of it into AI.

China too, is itself marching towards the future of AI. Russian President Vladimir Putin recently said that whoever masters AI will become “ruler of the world.” Last year, China’s State Council issued a Next Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan to become the “premier global AI innovation center” by 2030, when it predicts China’s core AI industry will be worth US$148 billion, with AI-related fields at US$1.48 trillion. And Baidu intends to take full advantage of the coming world of AI.

In this issue, SME discovers the journey of Baidu and Robin Li, from humble beginnings, to seeing off the mightiest American giant, and the way forward in China’s hypercompetitive environment.