New | Baidu’s chief scientist resigns, in a setback for company’s AI push
Andrew Ng, the Stanford University academic and former head of Google Brain, said he’ll be leaving Baidu next month, after three years on the job leading the search operator’s artificial intelligence research.
Andrew Ng, the chief scientist of China’s dominant Internet search engine operator, said on Wednesday he will be resigning from Baidu Inc next month, in a move that could set back the company’s reliance on artificial intelligence as the centrepiece of its business revival programme.
“The industrial revolution freed humanity from much repetitive physical drudgery,” Ng wrote in a blog post announcing his intention to step down, entitled “Opening a new chapter of my work on AI” on the publishing platform Medium. “I now want AI to free humanity from repetitive mental drudgery, such as driving in traffic.”
Ng’s departure comes at a critical time for founder Robin Li Yanhong, as he tries to recast Baidu as an AI-powered technology company, after 2016 revenue growth slowed for the first time since his company’s establishment in 2000 to a single digit.
Baidu’s advertising revenue slowed due to the Chinese government’s tightened regulations, after more than a decade of growing between 35 per cent and 55 per cent every year. Baidu’s search, the cornerstone of the company’s 70.5 billion yuan (US$10.2 billion) of revenue last year, is also under threat as local competitors have been gaining market share.
The task of spearheading all these fell to Ng, a Stanford University academic born in the UK but brought up in Hong Kong and Singapore.