百度發力人工智能突圍戰 China's Baidu searches for AI edge

Andrew Ng is hunched over his smArtphone, in a pantomime of key-pecking, squinting, typo-ridden discomfort. “This is how we do it today,” he says.

吳恩達(Andrew Ng)駝着背低着頭，略帶誇張地在他的智能手機上比劃着不停點擊屏幕、眯着眼卻仍然錯字連篇的那種不自在的樣子。“我們如今是這樣做的，”他稱。

“And this is how we should be doing it,” says the chief scientist for Baidu, China’s largest search engine. He sits back in his chair, speaking to no one in particular with his phone placed on the table. The one-finger typing agony of millions of smartphone users should one day become a thing of the past, he says. All it would take is the creation of a reasonably accurate, pocket-sized electronic version of a human brain.

“而我們應該這樣做，”這位百度(Baidu)的首席科學家稱。他靠在座位上，沒有特定對象地說着話，手機放在桌子上。他說，數百萬智能手機用戶用一個手指敲字的痛苦有一天應該成爲過去。而這隻需要創造一種達到合理精確度、與口袋大小相當的電子版人類大腦。百度是中國最大的搜索引擎。

Mr Ng is an expert in deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that focus on teaching computers how to talk, listen, read, and think like us. The area is fast becoming a priority for the world’s biggest technology companies, including Baidu as it tackles the era of the mobile internet.

吳恩達是深度學習(deep learning)領域的專家，該領域是人工智能的一個分支，專注於讓計算機學習如何像我們一樣聽、說、讀、思。由於該領域與移動互聯網時代緊密相連，它正迅速成爲包括百度在內的全球最大科技公司的優先發展領域。

“The whole world is switching to mobile devices but no one has created a usable interface to input into the devices,” he says. With the development of artificial intelligence, “soon you’ll be able to order food and just say ‘Can I have some food delivered to my house before I get home?’ out loud.”

“整個世界都在轉向移動設備，但是還沒人創造出向移動設備輸入指令的有用接口，”他稱。隨着人工智能的發展，“很快你將可以在訂購食物時只需要大聲說一句‘能在我回家前送些食物到我家中嗎？’”

“It won’t even feel like technology, it will just be in the background.”

“感覺上甚至都不像是科技，而就在後臺裏。”

In addition to better voice recognition, AI is being talked about for any number of uses from predicting advertising clicks to recognising faces.

除了更好的語音識別，從預測廣告點擊量到人臉識別技術的很多領域都在討論使用人工智能。

Since joining Baidu last year, Mr Ng has been steadily working to implement this vision. A UK native with Chinese roots, he founded in 2011 Google Brain, the US technology company’s deep learning project, and led it until he joined the Chinese company last year. Poaching him was regarded as a coup in the technology world.

自從去年加入百度以來，吳恩達一直在爲實現這個願景而穩紮穩打。作爲一名出生在英國的華人，他在2011年創建了“谷歌大腦”(Google Brain)——谷歌的深度學習項目，並且在去年加入百度前一直領導着該項目。百度撬走吳恩達被認爲是科技界的一次政變。

He describes the advanced computers at Baidu’s Sunnyvale, California, lab as “rocket engines” whose software can be taught to mimic the functioning of the human mind. Their “fuel” is data, which he gets from Baidu’s trove of online video and audio output as he works to teach the electronic brain to listen and speak.

他把百度位於加州森尼韋爾(Sunnyvale)實驗室中的先進計算機比作“火箭引擎”，計算機中的軟件可以學習模擬人類思想的功能。在吳恩達教電子大腦聽和說時，它們的“燃料”就是他從百度在線視頻和音頻輸出資料庫中得到的數據。

The company has an advantage in deep-learning algorithms for speech recognition in that most video and audio in China is accompanied by text — nearly all news clips, television shows and films are close-captioned and almost all are available to Baidu and Iqiyi, its video affiliate.

百度在語音識別深度學習算法方面具有優勢，因爲中國大多數視頻和音頻都伴有文本——幾乎所有新聞剪輯、電視節目及電影都有詳細的字幕，而百度及其視頻子公司愛奇藝(Iqiyi)可以獲得幾乎所有此類內容。

While a typical academic project uses 2,000 hours of audio data to train voice recognition, says Mr Ng, the troves of data available to China’s version of Google mean he is able to use 100,000 hours.

吳恩達說，一個典型的學術項目會利用2000小時的音頻數據來訓練語音識別，但百度——中國版谷歌——擁有的龐大數據庫意味着他可以利用10萬小時。

He declines to specify just how much the extra 98,000 hours improves the accuracy of his project, but insists it is vital.

他拒絕詳細說明額外9.8萬小時在多大程度上提升了其項目的精確度，但堅稱這至關重要。

“A lot of people underestimate the difference between 95 per cent and 99 per cent accuracy. It’s not an ‘incremental’ improvement of 4 per cent; it’s the difference between using it occasionally versus using it all the time,” he says.

“許多人低估了95%精確度與99%精確度之間的區別。這不是4%的“增量”提升；這是偶爾使用與始終使用之間的區別，”他說。

Thanks to the strides made in Chinese language voice recognition — a particular challenge because of the number of homonyms and the importance of context — Baidu will soon roll out Deepspeech, a voice recognition software similar to Apple’s Siri.

由於在漢語語音識別方面取得了巨大進步（漢語中的大量同音異義詞和語境的重要性使之極具挑戰），百度即將推出Deepspeech——一款類似於蘋果(Apple)的Siri的語音識別軟件。

Other Chinese companies including Alibaba and Tencent are also making advances in AI, but thanks largely to Mr Ng’s reputation Baidu is now judged by industry experts to be ahead of its domestic peers, ranking up alongside US rivals Facebook, Google, and IBM.

包括阿里巴巴(Alibaba)、騰訊(Tencent)在內的其他中國企業在人工智能方面也取得了進步，但主要得益於吳恩達的聲望，行業專家如今認爲百度要領先於國內同行，可與美國競爭對手Facebook、谷歌和IBM比肩。

“Artificial intelligence is an oligopoly,” says Yang Jing, founder of AI Era, an association for the artificial intelligence industry in China. “It’s a game for the titans.”

“人工智能是寡頭壟斷行業，”中國人工智能行業協會新智元(AI Era)創始人楊靜說，“這是一個巨頭間的遊戲。”

Baidu already saves Rmb17m ($2.7m) per day at its data centres by using deep-learning algorithms to predict hard drive malfunctions, and it is also using AI to optimise the use of advertisements and photos to improve clickthrough rates. It would not reveal how much it is spending on AI development overall.

百度通過在數據中心利用深度學習算法預測硬盤故障已經可以每天節省1700萬元人民幣（合270萬美元），而且還利用人工智能優化廣告和相片的使用來提升點擊率。該公司並未透露在人工智能開發上共計投入多少資金。

But in spite of lofty long-term ambitions, translating deep learning into money-making projects is still largely on the horizon.

儘管雄心勃勃，但要將深度學習轉變成賺錢的項目仍有很長一段路要走。

Mr Ng is undaunted. “There’s no question that [AI] is creating huge economic value; there’s no question that this will continue to create huge advances,” he says. “There is still a huge gap between the way machines learn and the way humans learn.”

吳恩達毫無畏懼。“毫無疑問，（人工智能）正在創造巨大的經濟價值；毫無疑問，這將繼續創造巨大的進步，”他說，“機器的學習方式與人類的學習方式之間仍存在巨大差距。”