China's biggest search engine is pushing at the boundaries of artificial intelligence – and self-driving bikes are just the beginning

Here comes the boom (Image: Liu Jin/AFP/Getty Images)

IS BAIDU about to step it up a gear? Rumours have been circulating that the Chinese search engine is developing a bike that could drive itself through packed city streets. The project isn’t ready to be launched yet but Baidu confirmed it is exploring the idea.

The news is intriguing, and not just because self-navigating bikes would be cool. Research into autonomous vehicles is yet another way that Baidu is following Google’s model of pushing at the boundaries of artificial intelligence.

Baidu is the biggest search engine in China, beating Google as well as local competitors like Sogou and 360. It offers an array of other services, including a collaborative encyclopedia, an automated newsfeed and street-view-enhanced maps. All bear similarities to big Western brands. And now Baidu is setting its sights overseas: last week it started operating in Brazil.


Meanwhile, the company has spent the past few years investigating artificial intelligence. Last year, for example, Baidu’s labs unveiled a visual search engine powered by neural networks, a computational model that is styled loosely on the human brain.

In May, Baidu hired computer scientist Andrew Ng to head up a new AI lab in Silicon Valley. Ng is known for founding Google Brain, a research project that harnesses huge clusters of computers to do machine learning. Now, Baidu wants to use similar techniques to improve speech recognition, computer vision and natural-language processing.

“Advanced artificial intelligence technology is the force that powers the internet,” Ng says. The research team at Baidu can be the “future heroes of deep learning”, he claims.

Ng even says Baidu could give Google a run for its money. Artificial intelligence researchers need a lot of data to play with, and there are only a few companies out there with enough. Baidu is one of them. Over the coming months, its AI lab plans to build the world’s largest cluster of GPUs, a type of processor that has proved useful for machine-learning tasks. With a more powerful machine they think they will be able to solve tougher problems.

Baidu also wants to train its systems to work with untagged data. Most big AI successes have come from working with information that has already been identified by humans – for example, pictures that are labelled with “cat”, “car”, or “baby”. But people don’t need tags, we learn by experiencing the world for ourselves. Baidu wants to develop AI that can do the same.

With these projects, Baidu is hoping to help computers better understand spoken and written language and make it easier to dictate emails to your phone or ask it verbally for directions.

Ng says that many comparisons with Google are oversimplifications. “The China internet ecosystem is completely different from the US one,” he says. China has nearly twice as many web users as the US and is the country with most cellphones per person.

China has nearly twice as many web users as the US and the most cellphones per person

There are signs Baidu wants to launch in Indonesia and north Africa, says Min Jiang of the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, but it remains to be seen how it will fare. “So far, Baidu has been really successful only inside China,” she says.

Leader: “Baidu will battle Google for hearts and minds“

This article appeared in print under the headline “‘China’s Google’ is on a roll”