As the quest to master artificial intelligence intensifies, China’s tech trio of Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent have a distinct advantage over their Silicon Valley rivals — data.
As Robin Li, chairman and chief executive of Baidu, says: “Baidu knows you better than you know yourself.”
Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, have embraced AI with alacrity: setting up specialist labs at home and overseas and hiring top engineers. Much like their US peers such as Google, they are using machine learning to push into newer fields of autonomous driving, medical diagnosis, facial recognition for payments and AI-enabled hardware that can be operated by voice.