Baidu hires former Googler
The Chinese tech giant has hired former Googler and Stanford University professor Andrew Ng
Chinese tech giant Baidu raised a storm last week by announcing that it had hired Andrew Ng to lead its new Artificial Intelligence research laboratory in Sunnyvale California.
Andrew Ng is a Stanford university professor and machine learning researcher. He is also the co- founder and chairman of the Coursera. His online course on Machine Learning is touted as being the first true Massive Open Online Course.
To underscore the scale of the victory Andrew Ng was the principal architect behind Google’s Deep Learning project at the X- Labs, called Google Brain, and it is widely rumoured that the American search giant had been trying its hardest to get its hands on him for a long time. The AI/ Machine Learning space is rapidly heating up. Google and Facebook users may have noticed this in the form of superior quality search being pushed to them. There have been a slew of new entrants into the market such as Facebook, which recently hired Yann Le Cun, a famous Machine Learning researcher from NYU and IBM, which has recently spun off a new company called Watson from its research division.
Now Baidu too is set to join the big league. Baidu is a Chinese language search engine, much like Google, and is known for its dominance in the Chinese market. Baidu is leading a $ 300 million investment into the AI research lab which Ng is heading and the lab will boast of 200 leading researchers.
This may be the first time a non- US tech company has raised a challenge to search giant Google by setting up shop in its backyard and moving beyond simply replicating its functionalities.