source from：ft
https://www.ft.com/content/4d23755c-0ead-11e7-b030-768954394623
Artificial intelligence expert Andrew Ng to leave Baidu

5 HOURS AGO by: Yuan Yang in Beihai
Andrew Ng is to leave Baidu after three years as its chief scientist, dealing a blow to the Chinese tech group’s artificial intelligence ambitions.

Mr Ng’s looming departure in April comes as the search engine group has increasingly focused on AI, with chief executive Robin Li earlier this year describing the technology as Baidu’s “key strategic focus for the next decade”.

“Having participated in the AI transformation of two large tech companies, I’m excited about looking elsewhere,” said Mr Ng, adding that he would now seek projects outside of big tech groups, although he would not rule out joining one.

New York-listed Baidu bolstered its talent pool in January by luring Lu Qi as its new chief operating officer. Mr Qi was previously global executive vice-president at Microsoft and is seen by peers in Silicon Valley as a leading expert in the field of AI.

Mr Ng said he had been “thinking for some time” about leaving Baidu, and that the appointment of Mr Qi made it much easier to do so. In a blog post, Mr Ng said: “Baidu’s AI is incredibly strong, and the team is stacked up and down with talent; I am confident AI at Baidu will continue to flourish.”


Baidu has pledged to dedicate more resources to AI hiring this year, including a recruitment drive in top US universities. Attracting AI-versed engineers is important for developing Baidu’s business in search and advertising placement, driverless cars, and speech recognition for Duer, its Amazon Alexa-like digital assistant.

Mr Ng joined Baidu in May 2014 from Coursera, the online educational platform that he co-founded. The British-born, Singapore-raised computer scientist, who also founded the Google Brain project, is based at Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI lab, where he will remain as chief scientist until the end of April.

“In the future I want AI to be as pervasive as electricity is today,” said Mr Ng, who has cemented in Baidu the premise that AI technology will revolutionise industry.

Some 1,300 AI researchers report directly to Mr Ng at the Baidu Research labs, as well as additional teams working on technologies such as speech recognition, big data, and teams exploring new business applications of AI.

Mr Ng said he is “deeply excited” about the future of Chinese AI research and will spend more time in Beijing, but that he has no plans to leave the US.

He lives in Palo Alto with his wife Carol Reiley, co-founder of Silicon Valley-based autonomous cars start-up Drive.ai.

Baidu said that it would not appoint a direct replacement for Mr Ng, but instead will consolidate its technology teams into the AI Group, which will headed by Haifeng Wang, currently vice-president.

Mr Wang has worked on the machine processing of human languages and is known in academic circles for being the current and only Chinese president of the Association for Computational Linguistics, a US-based research body.