Two years into his gig as chief scientist for Chinese internet giant Baidu Inc., Andrew Ng, the former Google executive who founded the company’s artificial-intelligence unit, is pushing Baidu to become a leader in artificial intelligence.

“Baidu is clearly playing on the highest levels on the global stage and that takes real innovation,” Mr. Ng said. “Frankly there aren’t other Chinese companies I bother to benchmark us with.”

Leading a team of about 800 employees, Mr. Ng says Baidu has become a leader in high-performance computing that has allowed the company to be among the upper echelon of tech firms to apply deep learning -- where computers learn by themselves -- to internet search, improve speech recognition, and develop autonomous-driving cars.

Mr. Ng spoke with The Wall Street Journal from Baidu’s offices in Sunnyvale, Calif., about data as one of the company’s strongest assets, where Chinese tech firms are ahead of U.S. firms, and what it’s like to work for a fast-moving Chinese internet company.

Below are edited excerpts from the interview:

Baidu made a big splash last fall when announcing the timeline for the self-driving car. Can you give us an update on where that stands?

When we first made our announcement we announced three years to commercialization and five years to mass production. At that time, everyone thought this is so aggressive. Ever since we made that announcement, more and more companies have realized that aggressive timeline is possible. We have already begun testing in China and will test in U.S., [but] we haven’t announced a specific timeline.

Do things really move faster at a Chinese company?

Things go crazy quickly. I think the whole Chinese internet ecosystem is highly competitive and that’s just the way China has evolved. It makes it much more exciting and more stressful as well. I feel like we often see these titans in China and these battles are played out in very short time scales in a way you don’t see as much in the U.S.

Baidu Chief Scientist Andrew Ng Photo: Baidu

So does that mean China’s tech firms are ahead of their U.S. counterparts?

I feel like it’s very interesting to get to see two universes -- the U.S. internet ecosystem and the Chinese one. There’s so much insight in both, and in the areas where the U.S. is further ahead, Chinese companies should learn from the U.S., and in areas where Chinese companies are further ahead, such as on-demand services, mobile payments or the use of chat, I know U.S. companies are learning from them. I do see China is first in online-to-offline services, and then a year or two later it shows up in the U.S., and my wife and I can finally use it.

How is navigating artificial intelligence for a company that has a close relationship with the Chinese government different than working for a U.S. company?

The closest thing where that has touched my life was we wanted to improve our anti-porn filters. So that’s something one of my teams is working on, to ensure we have a high-quality porn filter. That’s the closest thing I can think of.

What about some of the newer Baidu capabilities, such as the crowd-control algorithm. Couldn’t that be something useful for the government to use to, say, monitor if a protest is on the horizon?

I’m honestly not aware of that being used in that way.

The idea of artificial intelligence still is very foreign and somewhat scary to people. How do you make it relatable?

I’ve recently been making this analogy that AI is the new electricity. About 100 years ago, companies started hiring a [vice president] of electricity in order to organize the electrification of a company, because electricity was a really complicated thing to organize. And today the notion of a VP of electricity is just ludicrous. People would sprinkle a little bit of electricity -- gas lamps, or replacing a few parts of a steam engine -- into their companies and I feel like that’s where we are with AI. People used to manually match advertisers with customers, and now we’re letting AI do that and it works a bit better.

These are the small changes. The more fundamental change for electricity was when you redesigned your entire manufacturing plant. We‘re just starting to think about how to develop fundamentally new types of businesses that leverage AI.

How is big data helping in AI innovation, and in corporate strategies?

Baidu, Google, Facebook , Amazon, Microsoft -- we all have fairly unique data assets and I think in the last decade we’ve all accumulated so much data. What’s been happening just in the last several years is we’re finally building the tools to exploit a lot of our data assets to a great degree.

I feel like this is just starting to change corporate strategy where we systematically think about our data assets and count on that being the defensible barrier. Sometimes we launch products because we think we want to acquire certain data assets, not always for the revenue. This is a new type of corporate strategy that’s enabled by AI.

Would some of the investments or partnerships Baidu makes be in an effort to fill spots where you don’t have your own data?

We definitely do have many partnerships where we see that one of the benefits of the partnership is being able to have better data. It’s really difficult for companies to copy each other’s data.

What’s the relationship between developing Baidu’s AI tools from a research aspect, and actually using them or bringing them to market?

It really varies. About a third of our team focuses on research and developing basic technologies and trends. Quite often we have a process where we go to the business units to try to understand what’s going on and how we can support them. We hear a lot about their real stories and their problems, so we end up partnering with them to try and solve these problems.

What’s an example of how these tools have helped people in real life?

Waimai [Baidu’s food delivery service] is all about logistics and getting you your food as quickly as possible. We use deep learning to predict when your food is going to arrive at your door -- how long it takes to make the food, the route the delivery person will take. And it turns out that’s really important, because when you really care is when you’re really hungry.

-- Alyssa Abkowitz. Follow her on Twitter @AlyssaAbkowitz