In the China tech space, Baidu is now a full-stack player in the AI industry. The company makes its own chips, has its own AI models (Ernie), its own cloud system, and it's integrating AI into its self-driving car business, Apollo Go. But before all this, Baidu was known for being China's leader in search. Things, obviously, have changed a lot since the company was founded in the late 1990s. In today's episode, we speak with Baidu CFO Henry He about the company's AI ambitions. He talks to us about maximizing token spend, how Chinese tech firms are thinking about safety and alignment, the global robotaxi competition, and how the core search business fits into the company now.
Read more:Chinese AI Stocks Rally on Demand Optimism and Policy SupportUS Seeks AI Partnership With EU on Regulation, Supply Chains
Only http://Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox each week, plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots
Subscribe to the Odd Lots NewsletterJoin the conversation: discord.gg/oddlots
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Ma Yanjun, General Manager of the AI Technology Ecosystem at Baidu, talks about how Baidu's PaddlePaddle stacks up against other AI frameworks, about Baidu's development of large language models and the direction of AI research in China more generally.
In this show I speak with Greg Diamos, senior computer systems researcher at Baidu. Greg joined me before his talk at the Deep Learning Summit, where he spoke on “The Next Generation of AI Chips.” Greg’s talk focused on some work his team was involved in that accelerates deep learning training by using mixed 16-bit and 32-bit floating point arithmetic. We cover a ton of interesting ground in this conversation, and if you’re interested in systems level thinking around scaling and accelerating deep learning, you’re really going to like this one. And of course, if you like this one, you’re also going to like TWiML Talk #14 with Greg’s former colleague, Shubho Sengupta, which covers a bunch of related topics. This show is part of a series of shows recorded at the RE•WORK Deep Learning Summit in Montreal back in October. This was a great event and, in fact, their next event, the Deep Learning Summit San Francisco is right around the corner on January 25th and 26th, and will feature more leading researchers and technologists like the ones you’ll hear here on the show this week, including Ian Goodfellow of Google Brain, Daphne Koller of Calico Labs, and more! Definitely check it out and use the code TWIMLAI for 20% off of registration.
This week my guest is Shubho Sengupta, Research Scientist at Baidu. I had the pleasure of meeting Shubho at the Rework Deep Learning Summit earlier this year, where he delivered a presentation on Systems Challenges for Deep Learning. We dig into this topic in the interview, and discuss a variety of issues including network architecture, productionalization, operationalization and hardware. The show notes can be found at twimlai.com/talk/14.