Lu offered up an eye-opening explanation of how Baidu stands to dominate
AI in China.
How do you describe your AI strategy?
We believe the best way to commercialize AI technology is to build ecosystems. Essentially, to enable our partners to better accelerate their pace of innovation, using healthy, stable economic models to build strong, long-term win-wins for our developers and partners. The baseline is Baidu Brain [the term Baidu uses for all of its AI assets]. It’s broader and more extensive than what Microsoft and Google offer today in the United States, because it’s a platform. We have 60 different types of AI services in our suite we call Baidu Brain.
And we’re the first major company to clearly separate the perceptual and the cognitive layer. Perceptive capability and the cognitive are related, but they are quite different. Most of the [other] AI platforms bundle them together.
What is Baidu’s equivalent of Siri or Cortana?
We are focusing on two platforms to bring our customers and partners together. The first platform we call DuerOS. DuerOS is a natural language-based, conversation-based, human computing platform. Very much like Alexa, Google Now, Siri, or Cortana in the United States.
