百度押注人工智能革命

Wei climbs into her car and tells it her destination. While the car manoeuvres through the morning traffic, her news app picks the stories she is most likely to enjoy and reads them aloud. As the car approaches the parking lot, a camera recognises her face and opens the gates.

小薇爬上車，告訴它她的目的地。當她的車在早高峰的路上穿梭自如時，她的新聞App挑選了她可能喜歡的新聞并大聲讀出來。當車駛近停車場時，攝像頭識別出她的臉并打開了大門。

This is the future that China’s search engine giant Baidu envisages, where artificial intelligence has made phones and computers obsolete.

這就是中國搜索引擎巨頭百度(Baidu)設(shè)想的未來，屆時人工智能將淘汰手機和計算機。

The AI revolution will be the next industrial revolution, the company says. The problem, as Baidu admits, is that it has already been late to the mobile revolution.

該公司表示，人工智能革命將成為下一場工業(yè)革命。問題是，正如百度所承認的，它在移動革命方面起步太晚。

When desktop-based browsers were the portal to the internet, search engines found it easy to generate revenues. But mobile interfaces limited the number of adverts on a screen, as well as dividing up the internet into closed app-based fiefdoms, such as Tencent’s WeChat, which have become their own portals to the internet.

當基于桌面的瀏覽器作為互聯(lián)網(wǎng)的入口時，搜索引擎發(fā)現(xiàn)創(chuàng)收易如反掌。但移動界面限制了屏幕上的廣告數(shù)量，并把互聯(lián)網(wǎng)分割成了基于App的封閉領(lǐng)地，比如騰訊(Tencent)的微信(WeChat)——它們成了進入互聯(lián)網(wǎng)的獨立入口。

Baidu was the slowest of China’s “big three” tech companies to create an interconnected “ecosystem” of mobile apps. Its revenue growth has lagged behind that of e-commerce giant Alibaba and Tencent.

百度是中國科技企業(yè)“三巨頭”中最晚打造移動App互聯(lián)“生態(tài)系統(tǒng)”的公司。它的營收增速落后于電商巨頭阿里巴巴(Alibaba)和騰訊。

“Somewhere along the line, Baidu forgot that they were an advertising platform like all internet giants,” said Philip Beck, an early investor in Baidu and chair of Dubeta, a private equity firm.

“不知何時，百度忘了自己是和所有互聯(lián)網(wǎng)巨頭一樣的廣告平臺，”百度的早期投資者、私募股權(quán)公司Dubeta的董事長菲利普•貝克(Philip Beck)表示。

Instead, Baidu is now betting on becoming the AI hegemon of the East, harnessing China’s internet-savvy users — who are also the world’s biggest online data-generating population — as a vital resource for AI research.

如今，百度正押注成為東方的人工智能霸主，利用熟悉互聯(lián)網(wǎng)的中國用戶——他們也是全世界最大的在線數(shù)據(jù)生成群體——作為人工智能研究的重要資源。

The company is in partnership with the government to build the country’s first national AI research laboratory in Beijing. Baidu increased its R&D spending to $464m from April to July this year, 28 per cent more than in the same period a year ago.

該公司正在與政府合作，在北京創(chuàng)建中國首個國家人工智能研究實驗室。今年4-7月，百度在研發(fā)上的支出增加至4.64億美元，較去年同期增長了28%。

“Baidu’s AI potential is transformative for China,” said Lawrence Burns, investment manager at Scottish fund Baillie Gifford, a long-term investor in the company.

“百度在人工智能方面的潛力對中國來說是變革性的，”蘇格蘭基金B(yǎng)aillie Gifford的投資經(jīng)理勞倫斯•伯恩斯(Lawrence Burns)表示。該基金是百度的長期投資者。

Projects in the works include Apollo, Baidu’s operating system for driverless cars. By the end of this year, the company plans to share with its partners technology for driving in simple urban conditions, and by the end of 2020, it is hoping to sell fully autonomous cars.

正在研發(fā)中的項目包括百度針對無人駕駛汽車設(shè)計的操作系統(tǒng)Apollo。今年年底，百度計劃與各合作伙伴分享在城市簡單路況下進行無人駕駛的技術(shù)，同時百度希望到2020年底開始銷售全自動駕駛汽車。

Then there is DuerOS, Baidu’s system for Amazon Alexa-style “conversational” personal assistants, which is aimed at a Chinese-language market so far under-served by Amazon and Google.

還有與亞馬遜(Amazon)Alexa類似的“對話式”個人助手系統(tǒng)DuerOS，面向目前亞馬遜和谷歌服務(wù)不足的中文市場。

But the main challenge facing Baidu now is how to fund the gap between the bright AI future it sees and the sluggish growth of the present mobile era.

但是百度面臨的主要挑戰(zhàn)是如何填補自身在移動時代發(fā)展緩慢與其所暢想的光明的人工智能未來之間的差距。

“I’d characterise Baidu as a successful executive in a midlife crisis. It’s going to have to go through some bad decisions before finding itself,” said Mr Beck. 貝克表示，“我把百度比作一個正處于中年危機的成功高管。它必須經(jīng)歷一些糟糕的決定才能找到自我。”

“Advertising on [Alibaba’s e-commerce site] Taobao is more accurate than on Baidu,” said Ding Junjie, professor of advertising at the Communications University of China. “Taobao has the specific data of customers’ purchase histories, but Baidu search histories only show users’ future shopping possibilities.”

“淘寶(阿里巴巴旗下的電商網(wǎng)站)的廣告比百度更精準，”中國傳媒大學(xué)(Communications University of China)廣告學(xué)教授丁俊杰表示，“淘寶擁有客戶購買記錄的詳細數(shù)據(jù)，但百度搜索歷史只能表明用戶未來的購物可能。”

Baidu is also stunted by its lack of user profiles. Whereas shopping on Taobao or messaging friends on WeChat is impractical without a user account, Baidu creates little need for its users to register when all they want is a search result.

百度也受制于缺少用戶概況信息。在淘寶購物或者用微信與好友發(fā)送信息都必須注冊用戶賬戶，而用戶對注冊百度賬戶的需求很小，因為他們只想要搜索結(jié)果。

Baidu is trying to change that. Last year, the company launched a news feed below the search bar that registers user interests and personalises story recommendations if they sign up — a move followed by Google last month.

百度正試圖改變這一點。去年，該公司在搜索欄下推出了信息流服務(wù)——如果用戶訂閱了該服務(wù)，百度會記錄用戶興趣并提供新聞報道的個性化推薦——上個月谷歌也推出了類似服務(wù)。

Baidu’s news feed had 100m active daily users as of July, an increase of roughly a fifth since April. By comparison, news aggregator Toutiao had 78m daily active users at the end of last year, while Tencent’s WeChat has 500m monthly active users, according to research firm eMarketer.

截至7月，百度信息流擁有1億日活用戶，比4月時增加了將近五分之一。相比之下，根據(jù)研究公司eMarketer的數(shù)據(jù)，新聞聚合App“今日頭條”(Toutiao)在去年底日活用戶為7800萬，而騰訊微信目前的月活用戶超過5億。

Baidu’s reliance on medical advertising clients caused a public relations crisis last year, when a young man died after receiving treatment from a questionable hospital that was placed high in search results. The effect was that Baidu lost a fifth of its advertising clients over the past year.

去年，百度對醫(yī)療廣告客戶的依賴引發(fā)了一場公關(guān)危機——一名年輕男子在一家在搜索結(jié)果中排在前列的問題醫(yī)院就診后去世。這一事件帶來的影響是百度在過去一年流失了五分之一的廣告客戶。

The company is also dogged by the prospect of being overtaken in China's tech top three by e-commerce giant JD.com, whose market capitalisation is encroaching on Baidu’s. But as analysts point out, JD’s retail-based business model means it is not competing directly for ads with Baidu.

該公司還面臨著可能被電商巨頭京東(JD.com)取代其在“中國科技三巨頭”中位置的問題。京東的市值正在逼近百度。但分析師指出，京東以零售為基礎(chǔ)的商業(yè)模式意味著它不會與百度直接競爭廣告。

“Baidu’s Apollo and DuerOS initiatives give it the opportunity to dominate the AI era,” said Xue Yu, analyst at market research firm IDC. “Of course, the question is whether it can break out of being constrained on all sides by fierce competition.”

“Apollo和DuerOS項目將使百度有機會在人工智能時代占據(jù)主導(dǎo)地位，”市場研究公司IDC的分析師薛宇表示，“當然，問題是它能否打破目前在激烈競爭下四處受制的局面。”