Boffin behind AI drive moves on

Company’s revival now at risk

THE chief scientist helping drive Baidu Inc’s push into artificial intelligence is quitting the Chinese search giant, putting at risk its efforts to put AI at the centre of a business revival.

Andrew Ng, a Stanford University academic who worked on deep learning at Alphabet Inc before joining Baidu in 2014, said he was leaving the business next month. Ng doesn’t plan to join another technology company and will seek to bring AI into sectors such as health care and education around the world.

The departure comes at a crucial point for the Beijing-based company as it attempts to revive its fortunes by embracing machine intelligence across all of its business units. His decision to leave comes after Qi Lu was hired in January as Baidu’s group president and chief operating officer with a mandate to reshape the business, whose online ad business is under threat from rivals including Alibaba Group Holding Ltd and Tencent Holdings Ltd. Before joining, Lu was an executive at Microsoft Corp, leading efforts to develop artificial intelligence.

“It’s all very amicable,” Ng said, adding that he’d discussed the move with Baidu’s co-founder, Robin Li, for several months. “I’m very confident that the team will survive. In China, Baidu is so far ahead and AI is not easy.”

Ng doesn’t expect that his departure will derail or slow down Baidu’s AI efforts, pointing out that he’s still chief scientist until the handover at the end of April. Ng oversaw the growth of Baidu’s research team to 1 300 people scattered across research labs in Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Sunnyvale, California, a group that would increase by several hundred more this year, he has said. Of the more than 20 billion yuan ($2.9 billion) Baidu has spent on research and development over the past two-and-a-half years, most has been on AI, according to Li.

But Ng was a founding father of deep learning – a stream of AI recently popularised by tech giants around the world – and the public face of Baidu’s AI efforts.

“With him there, investors and analysts got more confidence about Baidu’s AI investments since he was quite well-known in the field and at Google before,” said Marie Sun, an analyst with Morningstar Investment Services. “If there’s no other well-known person from his field replacing his role, I think it could be negative news to the market.”

A co-founder of web-learning firm, Coursera Inc, Ng said he would reduce the amount of time he spent in China as his wife was based in the US. Ng said he’d been looking at the health care sector and was keen to help develop AI, for example, that could act as assistants for doctors or create customised pathways for education.

While Baidu hasn’t named a replacement for Ng as chief scientist, other executives are taking on some of his responsibilities. Yuanqing Lin, the head of the company’s Institute of Deep Learning, will run Baidu Research’s labs both in China and the US with machine translation expert Wang Haifeng to become the new head of Baidu’s AI Group.

The search provider will continue its AI efforts, employing its user data to build products that take advantage of the technology.

Baidu’s revenue growth slowed to 6 percent last year, after several years of growth ranging from 35 percent to 55 percent. The search business, which fuelled Baidu’s 70.6 billion yuan (about R128 billion) in 2016 sales, is under siege from local rivals: Alibaba has taken the lead in digital advertising, according to consultancy Emarketer Inc.