
Baidu Hires Andrew Ng - chriskanan
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527301/chinese-search-giant-baidu-hires-man-behind-the-google-brain
======
chriskanan
Andrew Ng on why he decided to leave his day-to-day responsibilities at
Coursera for Baidu: [http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal-
message...](http://blog.coursera.org/post/85921942887/a-personal-message-from-
co-founder-andrew-ng)

~~~
sytelus
Usual fluff. Only relevant part is,

 _With the MOOC movement healthy and growing, I now plan to dedicate more of
my time toward AI (Artificial Intelligence) and machine learning. I will be
joining Baidu as their Chief Scientist to help build out a research
organization, headquartered in Silicon Valley. Both education and AI have been
longstanding passions for me. I believe some of my skills will allow me to
make a contribution to the latter._

------
ChuckMcM
Wow, that was unexpected. I admire Ray Kurzweil but Andrew has always struck
me as that rare sort of person who can both see the big picture and pick out
the stepping stones to getting there. That is incredibly valuable and I did
not expect that Google would let him be poached by a rival search company.

~~~
vundervul
Ray Kurzweil is a laughingstock in the machine learning community and he
hasn't been a legitimate researcher for many years. Putting him in the same
sentence as Andrew Ng is a bit insulting.

~~~
p1esk
Kurzweil's life achievements look more impressive.

------
varelse
The most interesting thing about this announcement is the huge emphasis on
GPUs at Baidu driven by Ren Wu:

[http://on-demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/presentations/S465...](http://on-
demand.gputechconf.com/gtc/2014/presentations/S4651-deep-learning-meets-
heterogeneous-computing.pdf)

Combine this with Andrew Ng, whose own student Adam Coates matched Google's
cat detector network with 64 consumer grade GPUs, and we are in for
interesting times...

[http://www.stanford.edu/~acoates/papers/CoatesHuvalWangWuNgC...](http://www.stanford.edu/~acoates/papers/CoatesHuvalWangWuNgCatanzaro_icml2013.pdf)

~~~
bhrgunatha
In the presentation you linked by Baidu's Ren Wu on page 6 it says:

    
    
               Deep Learning:
        AI Brain   -   World's first RI
    

What is RI? I haven't seen the acronym before.

~~~
Mercher
Might just be "Research Institute":

'The Institute of Deep Learning (IDL) is the first formally established
research institution projected to be Baidu's “Artificial Intelligence Lab”.'

source: [http://idl.baidu.com/en/IDL-about.html](http://idl.baidu.com/en/IDL-
about.html)

~~~
bhrgunatha
Ah yes I think you're right - I guessed the I stood for intelligence and
couldn't come up with anything.

------
chriskanan
A more detailed article by MIT Technology Review:
[http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527301/chinese-
search-g...](http://www.technologyreview.com/news/527301/chinese-search-giant-
baidu-hires-man-behind-the-google-brain/)

~~~
dang
Thanks. We changed the url to that from
[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/baidu-opens-silicon-
valley-...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/baidu-opens-silicon-valley-lab-
appoints-andrew-ng-as-head-of-baidu-research-2014-05-16).

------
ant_sz
As a Chinese I have to say baidu dose have a bad reputation even in this
country. Even my friends that works at baidu feels confused after heard this.

Baidu devotes a lot in algorithm and machine learning. But when it comes to
Chinese market we can see that technology does not even play an important role
in one companies' success (marketing and government relations plays a more
important role).

I am wondering how long will baidu keep investing in deep learning as it has
so many troubles in international market (where technology really matters).

~~~
LiweiZ
baidu sucks. And we Chinese know it. I guess it has to keep investing in
relatively advanced tech to keep its high tech image for China market in U.S.
stock market. This at least is one of the results baidu wants.

------
strebler
Baidu's deep learning based image search is actually quite impressive:
[http://shitu.baidu.com/](http://shitu.baidu.com/)

~~~
cliveowen
shitu, not the best choice of word.

~~~
btian
It makes perfect sense in Mandarin, and since it's a Chinese site, I'll call
it a reasonable choice of word.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I'm sure we could form a pejorative from it. Like 你是土, pinyin is just so
ambiguous.

~~~
yen223
你是吐, for when you want to look for a spitting image of yourself ;)

------
pjungwir
Wow, I just finished his Coursera ML class this week. I hope that course
continues to be offered. I wish I could tell him thanks for teaching it! The
way he balances cutting-edge research with popularization of hard concepts
reminds me of Richard Feynman. Best of luck to him.

~~~
willis77
> reminds me of Michael Feynman

Richard Feynman?

~~~
pjungwir
Uh, yes. :-) Edited....

------
bayesianhorse
Hm, leaving Coursera to work at the most censored search engines of all times?
Not a good day for humanity...

------
billmalarky
"For now, relatively few people are versed in the tricks needed to get deep
learning to work well"

How does one exactly become one of these people? Is any of this information
public yet?

~~~
apu
The other responses to your question tell only part of the story. Yes, the
academic groups that work in deep learning publish papers describing their
methods. But these papers are rarely sufficient to be able to recreate the
models they built.

There's a lot of other knowledge/expertise/intuition that's required to make
working implementations. There have been some deep learning tutorials at
recent conferences that might be more in-depth. (See my previous comment [1]
for details.)

Another good way to learn is to look at some open source implementations, such
as caffe from berkeley [2] or overfeat from NYU [3].

In addition to showing how to choose architectures or set params, they also
have tricks for speeding things up. This is actually very important, as they
can make orders of magnitude difference (training in hours vs days).

[1]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7742192](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7742192)

[2] [http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/](http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/)

[3]
[https://github.com/sermanet/OverFeat](https://github.com/sermanet/OverFeat)

~~~
billmalarky
Excellent response. Thank you.

------
galfarragem
China is in the process of becoming a real superpower. They are making what US
made last century: attracting brains.

[http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=2014032...](http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20140326132305490)

------
auston
Andrew, is in my opinion, one of the smartest people alive today. Call it what
you'd like, but I'd love to see his work going into an American company.

~~~
btrombley
I 100% agree that Andrew is one of the smartest people I've ever met, but I
for one wouldn't mind if Baidu started to challenge Google in the deep
learning space. International competition will be better for American
companies than Google's current monopoly on the research and experts.

~~~
goldfeld
It never ceases to amaze me how many americans completely overlook this in
their blind patriotism. Baidu today may well be the only company able to
challenge Google's strength on the search engine land, and an effective
monopoly (i.e. if Google got their way with China and toppled Baidu) would be
sad for mankind. Here's hoping instead that a breath of american mindset at
Baidu can slowly make it reach out of China and who knows, challenge Google
with (non-censored as in China, and non-NSA'd as in Google) english results.

~~~
justicezyx
Given Baidu's long history of being "cooperative" with Government, I cannot
support such a company to be an effective competitor to Google. Besides, deep
learning is about far more than just search.

~~~
DominikR
Every company has to be cooperative with its government, or relocate/close.

It just happens that Google isn't based in China, therefore they were able to
make the decision not to expand to China.

But in the US, Google will have to accept basically anything the government
demands, as long as it is backed by the courts. (which isn't that hard since
the government just invents secret courts based on secret laws that back
almost 100% of the governments demands)

------
tomaskazemekas
It looks like the trend of search engines becoming more like recommender
systems will continue.

------
happyscrappy
Baidu has a long history of being one of the most proactive and restrictive
online censors in the search arena so how does he reconcile this
contradiction?

~~~
justicezyx
I think it's natural for Baidu to offer this kind of search capability as a
means to hunt down restricted information disguised in non-text format.

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tiatia
They should have hired Chuck Norris instead to shoot all the people that block
the internet in China or make the internet slow. With slow I mean slowing
gmail down by factor 40.

~~~
tiatia
Every Bozo downvoting this has obviously never lived in China

~~~
ternaryoperator
I expect the downvotes have little to do with true/untrue, but rather that the
comment is off topic and doesn't advance the conversation.

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arctansusan
By completely leaving Coursera, this is a vouch of confidence for MOOcs in
general. __sarcasm __Horray for worthless online degrees that have an
attrition rate past 90% of total registered students and a near-zero overall
completion rate. I 'm sure MOOCs will have a great future henceworth now that
the CEO of a very visible MOOC company has left.

~~~
towlesda
MOOCs are great for people who want to learn on their own (although no
different than classes in college, some are more valuable than others). I'm
not sure of the value these bring in getting a job, but the learning value
makes them very worthwhile.

~~~
visarga
> MOOCs are great for people who want to learn on their own

MOOC + in person coaching could solve the problem. We don't need professors,
we need coaches (experts in education, psychologists) to keep people motivated
and not drop off. Also, in large cities study groups could generate the same
feeling as going to a real class.

What we are missing in MOOCs is the motivational effect of meeting people (in
real life) who are serious about learning and seeing them work hard. That is
what makes us believe we can do it too.

