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Inside Baidu's Bid To Lead the AI Revolution (wired.com)
mirandakatz writes: China's search giant missed mobile: As WeChat and Alibaba deftly transformed their companies to suit mobile, Baidu stayed stuck in browser mode. It can't afford to make that mistake with the AI revolution -- and, as Jessi Hempel writes at Backchannel, it just might have an edge in its bid to come out on top. There's huge governmental support for AI in China, including a plan to make the country the world leader in AI by 2030, and it has double the number of people online than America does -- AKA vast quantities of raw data. Hempel traveled to Beijing to chronicle this tenuous moment in Baidu's history, and has delivered a deep look at Baidu's AI be on AI, speaking with key leaders including CEO Robin Li and COO Qi Lu. She writes that 'Robin Li is doubling down on a future beyond 2017. In that future, Baidu is not a series of products, but rather an engine that belongs inside everything -- an engine that powers Baidu back to dominance in China, and possibly far beyond.'
The way I see it. There won't be an AI revolution. Slowly the pieces of the weak-to-strong AI puzzle will fall into place, and only someone who's been comatose all the time will see the arrival of strong AI as a revolution. Examples of the pieces, weak AI that can do crude image recognition, synthesized voices like SIRI that actually sound better than a lot of non-native speakers of a given language (English in particular), weak AI that can defeat the best human minds in games like chess and go, self driving vehicles that can already drive better than a student driver.