百度押注人工智能革命
小薇爬上车，告诉它她的目的地。当她的车在早高峰的路上穿梭自如时，她的新闻App挑选了她可能喜欢的新闻并大声读出来。当车驶近停车场时，摄像头识别出她的脸并打开了大门。
This is the future that China’s search engine giant Baidu envisages, where artificial intelligence has made phones and computers obsolete.
这就是中国搜索引擎巨头百度(Baidu)设想的未来，届时人工智能将淘汰手机和计算机。
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.
该公司表示，人工智能革命将成为下一场工业革命。问题是，正如百度所承认的，它在移动革命方面起步太晚。
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.
当基于桌面的浏览器作为互联网的入口时，搜索引擎发现创收易如反掌。但移动界面限制了屏幕上的广告数量，并把互联网分割成了基于App的封闭领地，比如腾讯(Tencent)的微信(WeChat)——它们成了进入互联网的独立入口。
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.
百度是中国科技企业“三巨头”中最晚打造移动App互联“生态系统”的公司。它的营收增速落后于电商巨头阿里巴巴(Alibaba)和腾讯。
“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.
“不知何时，百度忘了自己是和所有互联网巨头一样的广告平台，”百度的早期投资者、私募股权公司Dubeta的董事长菲利普•贝克(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，百度正押注成为东方的人工智能霸主，利用熟悉互联网的中国用户——他们也是全世界最大的在线数据生成群体——作为人工智能研究的重要资源。
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.
该公司正在与政府合作，在北京创建中国首个国家人工智能研究实验室。今年4-7月，百度在研发上的支出增加至4.64亿美元，较去年同期增长了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潜力对中国来说是变革性的，”苏格兰基金Baillie Gifford的投资经理劳伦斯•伯恩斯(Lawrence Burns)表示。该基金是百度的长期投资者。
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.
正在研发中的项目包括百度针对无人驾驶汽车设计的操作系统Apollo。今年年底，百度计划与各合作伙伴分享在城市简单路况下进行无人驾驶的技术，同时百度希望到2020年底开始销售全自动驾驶汽车。
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.
还有与亚马逊(Amazon)Alexa类似的“对话式”个人助手系统DuerOS，面向目前亚马逊和谷歌服务不足的中文市场。
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.
但是百度面临的主要挑战是如何填补自身在移动时代发展缓慢与其所畅想的光明的人工智能未来之间的差距。
“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. 贝克表示，“我把百度比作一个正处于中年危机的成功高管。它必须经历一些糟糕的决定才能找到自我。”
“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.”
“淘宝(阿里巴巴旗下的电商网站)的广告比百度更精准，”中国传媒大学(Communications University of China)广告学教授丁俊杰表示，“淘宝拥有客户购买记录的详细数据，但百度搜索历史只能表明用户未来的购物可能。”
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户概况信息。在淘宝购物或者用微信与好友发送信息都必须注册用户账户，而用户对注册百度账户的需求很小，因为他们只想要搜索结果。
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.
百度正试图改变这一点。去年，该公司在搜索栏下推出了信息流服务——如果用户订阅了该服务，百度会记录用户兴趣并提供新闻报道的个性化推荐——上个月谷歌也推出了类似服务。
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，百度信息流拥有1亿日活用户，比4月时增加了将近五分之一。相比之下，根据研究公司eMarketer的数据，新闻聚合App“今日头条”(Toutiao)在去年底日活用户为7800万，而腾讯微信目前的月活用户超过5亿。
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，百度对医疗广告客户的依赖引发了一场公关危机——一名年轻男子在一家在搜索结果中排在前列的问题医院就诊后去世。这一事件带来的影响是百度在过去一年流失了五分之一的广告客户。
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.
该公司还面临着可能被电商巨头京东(JD.com)取代其在“中国科技三巨头”中位置的问题。京东的市值正在逼近百度。但分析师指出，京东以零售为基础的商业模式意味着它不会与百度直接竞争广告。
“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项目将使百度有机会在人工智能时代占据主导地位，”市场研究公司IDC的分析师薛宇表示，“当然，问题是它能否打破目前在激烈竞争下四处受制的局面。”
