China Internet:Embracing AI and robotics

Baidu focuses its future on AI.

Chinese leader in the AI space. Baidu, as China’s largest search engine, hasseen its investment in AI accelerate since hiring Dr. Lu Qi as the new ChiefOperating Officer in Jan 2017. It currently operates four research labs(Augmented Reality, AI, Deep Learning, and Big Data) across Beijing and SiliconValley. Some of its AI technology, such as speed and image recognition, isworld-leading. The AI has been applied to Search, Duer (similar to Siri),Autonomous Driving, Cloud and other products. Driverless cars areapproaching the commercialization stage. Among the AI-enabled productswithin Baidu, driverless cars present the best growth and commercializationopportunities. It has merged its L3 (eyes off) and L4 (mind off) autonomousdriving business into a single group (IDG) which is now led by Lu Qi. Baidulaunched the “Apollo Project” in April 2017 to open its autonomous drivingplatforms (hardware + software + cloud) to car manufacturers to developautonomous vehicles. Baidu has already partnered with local OEMs incl. Cherry,BYD and BAIC Motor. In terms of development timeline, Baidu plans to share itstechnology for simple urban road conditions by the end of 2017, with the ultimategoal of being fully autonomous on highways and open city roads by 2020.

Alibaba embeds AI across businesses.

Empowering e-Commerce and cloud. Alibaba is building up AI on large-scalecomputing power and data, and is exploring the potential to embed AI intovarious business lines. For its core e-commerce, Alibaba is applying AIalgorithms to shopping experience, to upgrade supply chain management, andto improve logistics efficiency; Alibaba Cloud is introducing AI services tohealthcare and manufacturing companies; and Alibaba’s affiliate Ant Financial isworking on face-recognition technology to secure e-payments. Cooperationwith business partners. In addition, Ant Financial acquired EyeVerify in Sep2015 for its biometric authentication technology. EyeVerify checks identitiesthrough eye-vein patterns and creates digital eye print IDs. Alibaba has alsoestablished Alibaba Robotics, a joint venture with SoftBank, to operate thePepper robot business in China. Softbank has sold 10,000 Pepper robots in theJapanese market. In China, Pepper will be powered by Alibaba’s YunOSoperating system and will help scan traveller ID cards and print boarding passes.

Tencent playing catch-up on AI.

Boosting AI lab and R&D capabilities. Among BAT, Tencent started relativelylate in the field of AI. But it has been boosting its R&D talents since 2016.

Tencent recently opened an artificial intelligence research facility in Seattle, US,to be led by former Microsoft scientist Yu Dong. This will strengthen its AIcapabilities in addition to the existing AI lab of about 50+ researchers and 200+engineers in Shenzhen. Voice, AI open source and cloud collaboration.

Tencent launched its Alexa-like AI voice assistant Dingdang in Apr 2017.

Tencent will integrate Dingdang into its apps and ecosystem with servicesincluding weather, news, music and LBS. Further, Tencent plans to open sourceits AI computing platform called Angel with a focus on machine learningtechniques. Tencent applies them internally in areas such as video streamingand social ads. In terms of Tencent Cloud, its offering comes with AI servicesincluding face detection and optical character recognition, and Tencent recentlyadopted NVIDIA Tesla for AI cloud computing.