6 ms·

I would treat anything from Baidu with a grain of salt, mainly Baidu is not the most technical competent company, even among Chinese companies. There are other

I would treat anything from Baidu with a grain of salt, mainly Baidu is not the most technical competent company, even among Chinese companies. There are other researches on ghost cities using methods like at night counting the number of units with lights on and do this for consequtive n nights, or measure the total power consumption over a period of time.

hodder 11y ago
What makes you say Baidu is not technically competent? Andrew Ng's work alone seems to be on the cutting edge of machine learning and voice/image recognition. While Andrew Ng's work gets a lot of press, there appears to be other interesting work coming out of Baidu in O2O, search, wiki, image,video, self driving cars etc. They also appear to be a well run business as evidenced by rapid revenue and earnings growth for over a decade. I'm biased as a BIDU shareholder, but that is precisely why I'm interested in your critism.
- Retric 11y ago
  Without massive support from the Chinese government they would get crushed. That's not the environment that breeds competence.
  - sbilstein 11y ago
    Huh? The Chinese govt is known for not allowing foreign web companies lots of freedom to compete but there are certainly domestic search engines to compete with. Baidu has about 71% share of the search market in China.
- hueving 11y ago
  They exist primarily because competition was pushed out by the government.
- happywolf 11y ago
  Simple. Did you actually use Baidu? I do, on a regular basis. Let me elaborate Andrew Ng no doubt is a famous researcher, but I am talking about a common user's experience, and no, I don't see anything that reminds of machine learning while using Baidu services. To give you an example, search for 'Windows 7' in Baidu. Here is the screen capture of the results I got (http://imgur.com/nNBSo3g http://imgur.com/nNBSo3g), basically there is no mention of Microsoft's site. I do see the first is the link for people download this software for free. Ok, where is the machine learning? There could be a few reasons explaining this behavior, but I don't wish to go into those. To say the least: if it is not technical issue, it is ethical. Both are very important to shareholders. As a control, I searched for the same on Google, and the first 2 results are from wikipedia, while the rest are from microsoft.com, mixed with news results from news sites, which are very to the point. Another example, Baidu's SDK has opened up security holes up to 100 million Android devices (http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/02/bunk-baidu-sdk-puts-backdoor-on-millions-of-android-devices/ http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/02/bunk-baidu-sdk-puts-backd...), and unfortunately, this isn't the first incident in 2015. As far as I can recall, there are at least 3-4 similar issues, unintentionally or intentionally caused by technical incompetency. Disclosure: I worked in China for some time and now still got business connection with it. I am not an armchair warrior to bash China.
  - anunderachiever 11y ago
    Maybe that is intended: "China's replacement for Windows is an XP ripoff" http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/25/9396769/china-NeoKylin-operating-system http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/25/9396769/china-NeoKylin-ope...
    - nickff 11y ago
      This would be an especially good reason not to trust Baidu; if they are an arm of a totalitarian state.
  - ethanbond 11y ago
    It seems unfair to jump from "it's a shoddy product" and "they introduced a security hole" to "they're not technically competent." A lot of American and European companies have done, and consistently do, the same things. It seems like there's some hypercriticism due to underlying suspicions of intentionality – however well-founded those suspicions may be.

hodder 11y ago

What makes you say Baidu is not technically competent? Andrew Ng's work alone seems to be on the cutting edge of machine learning and voice/image recognition. While Andrew Ng's work gets a lot of press, there appears to be other interesting work coming out of Baidu in O2O, search, wiki, image,video, self driving cars etc. They also appear to be a well run business as evidenced by rapid revenue and earnings growth for over a decade. I'm biased as a BIDU shareholder, but that is precisely why I'm interested in your critism.

Retric 11y ago
Without massive support from the Chinese government they would get crushed. That's not the environment that breeds competence.
- sbilstein 11y ago
  Huh? The Chinese govt is known for not allowing foreign web companies lots of freedom to compete but there are certainly domestic search engines to compete with. Baidu has about 71% share of the search market in China.
hueving 11y ago
They exist primarily because competition was pushed out by the government.
happywolf 11y ago
Simple. Did you actually use Baidu? I do, on a regular basis. Let me elaborate Andrew Ng no doubt is a famous researcher, but I am talking about a common user's experience, and no, I don't see anything that reminds of machine learning while using Baidu services. To give you an example, search for 'Windows 7' in Baidu. Here is the screen capture of the results I got (http://imgur.com/nNBSo3g http://imgur.com/nNBSo3g), basically there is no mention of Microsoft's site. I do see the first is the link for people download this software for free. Ok, where is the machine learning? There could be a few reasons explaining this behavior, but I don't wish to go into those. To say the least: if it is not technical issue, it is ethical. Both are very important to shareholders. As a control, I searched for the same on Google, and the first 2 results are from wikipedia, while the rest are from microsoft.com, mixed with news results from news sites, which are very to the point. Another example, Baidu's SDK has opened up security holes up to 100 million Android devices (http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/02/bunk-baidu-sdk-puts-backdoor-on-millions-of-android-devices/ http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/02/bunk-baidu-sdk-puts-backd...), and unfortunately, this isn't the first incident in 2015. As far as I can recall, there are at least 3-4 similar issues, unintentionally or intentionally caused by technical incompetency. Disclosure: I worked in China for some time and now still got business connection with it. I am not an armchair warrior to bash China.
- anunderachiever 11y ago
  Maybe that is intended: "China's replacement for Windows is an XP ripoff" http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/25/9396769/china-NeoKylin-operating-system http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/25/9396769/china-NeoKylin-ope...
  - nickff 11y ago
    This would be an especially good reason not to trust Baidu; if they are an arm of a totalitarian state.
- ethanbond 11y ago
  It seems unfair to jump from "it's a shoddy product" and "they introduced a security hole" to "they're not technically competent." A lot of American and European companies have done, and consistently do, the same things. It seems like there's some hypercriticism due to underlying suspicions of intentionality – however well-founded those suspicions may be.