s PECIAL REPORT
banks on April 28, Li expressed his hope
that the company would complete its “stra-
tegic evolution to become China’s largest
AI-centric technology company” in 2017.
The company has made several acquisitions
toward this goal since the beginning of the
year. In February, Baidu bought Raven Tech,
a Shanghai-based startup that develops smart
homes. In April, Baidu announced the acqui-
sition of xPerception, a US startup on visual
perception software and hardware solutions.
Baidu said in its press release on the deal that
the move would reinforce its AI-based prod-
ucts and projects like augmented reality (AR)
and autonomous driving.
Self-driving cars are another Baidu priority.
On April 18, the company made a surprise
announcement that it would open its self-
driving technology platform, including both
hardware and software, to the autonomous
driving industry. Lu Qi described intelligent
vehicles as “one of AI’s biggest opportunities”
in the press release. In March, it confirmed
that it would lead the new investment round
in NextEV, a Shanghai-based smart electric
car startup, which already had investment
from Tencent, a Chinese giant in social
media and video gaming. In August 2016,
Baidu USA got approval to test autonomous
vehicles on California public roads, join-
ing 30 other companies including BMW,
Google and Tesla. In November 2016, Baidu
unveiled a driverless truck jointly developed
with Foton Motor Group.
Baidu is also pushing forward fundamen-
tal research on AI, which is thought to be
a weakness in China’s AI efforts as a whole.
On March 2, a national lab on deep learning
technology was launched at Baidu, realising
Li’s dream to build a national infrastructure
platform for AI researchers and developers.
Sun Wei, a senior official with the National
Development and Reform Commission,
China’s leading economic planner, said at the
launch ceremony that the lab was expected to
improve China’s ability in original innovation
on AI. Partners of the project include Tsin-
ghua University, Beihang University known
for its research and education on aeronautics
and astronautics, the China Academy of In-
formation and Communications Technology
and the China Electronics Standardisation
Institute.Values Talk
Both Baidu and China have reason to be
proud of their advances in AI so far, but there
is little space for complacency. In a highly
competitive sector, Baidu has to work hard
to keep ahead. There is still no clear route to
monetisation for Baidu’s AI products, which
remain funded by the company’s advertising
revenue from its search engine. The same is
true of Silicon Valley companies.
But there are also pressing ethical issues.
One of the reasons China has been attractive
to AI researchers is because of the relatively
weak status of the country’s data protection
law enforcement, meaning a huge amount of
“grey data” is available to researchers. Since
deep learning depends on a massive pool of
data, this is a considerable advantage, but it
also raises pressing questions about the pro-
tection of individuals’ rights and privacy.
While the Chinese government has repeat-
edly pledged better data protection, Baidu
has a particularly poor reputation in this re-
gard. In January 2016, the management of
an online non-profit hemophiliacs forum
was sold by Baidu to institutions and indi-
viduals touting dubious healthcare services
and products. The following month, WeiZexi, a 22-year-old university student with
end-stage cancer, publicly accused Baidu of
selling its search results to the highest bidder.
Wei’s parents had raised money to get him
treatment at a hospital ranked top of Baidu’s
search results. The hospital claimed it was a
part of a top-level military hospital in Beijing,
and the treatment was being done in collabo-
ration with Stanford University. Both claims
were false. These scandals triggered public
outrage. In May, Baidu was ordered by regu-
lators to change its recommendation system- but trust in it is still at a low.
Baidu’s academic integrity has also been
questioned. In 2015, a Baidu research team
claimed that they did better than Google in a
contest on image recognition at the ImageN-
et Challenge. They admitted later that they
amended the rules to win and apologised for
the irregularity. As a result, Baidu was banned
from the contest for 12 months. Baidu fired
the team leader, who denied cheating, but
the firm’s image was already damaged.
Even within China, Baidu is not regarded
by the AI industry as a champion in partic-
ular areas of deep learning it is focused on,
including voice and image recognition, Pro-
fessor Yu Kai, chief scientist and co-founder
of AISpeech, a startup in Suzhou, Jiangsu
Province, and director of the SpeechLab at
the Computer Science and Engineering De-
partment of Shanghai Jiao Tong University,
told ChinaReport. His own company is an
example. Goldman Sachs, an international
investment bank, has identified five key play-
ers in the subsector of “voice detection and
replication” in its AI report in November
- AISpeech and the Beijing-based start-
up Mobvoi are the two from China, with the
other three from the US.
The report also shows that China has “sur-
passed the US” in terms of the number of
journal articles cited for “deep learning” or
“deep neural network.” It concludes that “the
key players at the forefront of artificial intel-
ligence are likely to continue to be in the US
and China.”
Yu thinks China is an important, but not
Wang Haifeng, vice president of Baidu
and head of Baidu’s artificial intelligence
technology platform AIGPhoto by cns