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.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.wired.com