4 ms·

Baidu Goes All In on AI

72 points by ptrptr 10y ago

alistproducer2 10y ago
I think this reflects Baidu playing catch-up with Google more than the mobile bet bring dead.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
200jin 10y ago
Badidu's slogan: Be the Evil, serve the Evil
- johansch 10y ago
  I thought that was the slogan of Qihoo 360.
est 10y ago
Background story: Baidu totally missed China's mobile Internet market compared with Tencent or Alibaba. It's so called O2O (a term mostly used by Chinese) market share is burning money. Baidu's dreadful bet is today's AI hype.
- yeukhon 10y ago
  Tencent's QQ (chat messenger) was the main reason for the success. QQ attracted millions of young users. Within the chat messenger you could play games and eventually blog/personal space, payment, and email were added. This type of product development is extremely common practice in Chinese Internet product. Portal experience and one-stop shop experience are critical UX one must considered in China (and Japan too) to be successful. Baidu made the mistake of advertising itself as a search engine like Google, but failed to compete and catching up in 2000s when other competitors like Tencent was already taking up millions of active users. Yes, Baidu music exists, Baidu Bar (like Yahoo! Answers) also exists, but they are subpar. Regarding to 360, basically back in 2000s, companies realized the best way to sell their product was (1) partnership with computer seller by bundling software just like McAcfee / Norton, and/or (2) provide toolbar so users can access content from the browsers. Tencents and others developed their own forked browsers. Then the era of virus/malware terror plague began as people learned either the software have backdoor (they all do actually), software doing weird things (e.g. system optimizer!), or people downloaded the software from an untrusted source because of piracy and poor Internet safety education (when people are pirating, they go to forums to look for software and if a thread is hot users would click on it and get convinced to try the software - little to their knowledge, most of them have backdoors). 360 was the most popular free anti-virus in China, and the company did a massive marketing campaign and everyone fell for it.
rodorgas 10y ago
I would support an AI solution to make Baidu uninstall possible.
startupdiscuss 10y ago
Q to the community: Should the wisdom of investing in ML depend on the probability of finding problems in that domain that can be solved by: regression, classification, clustering or prediction? So, if Baidu has many problems that are likely (by whatever estimate) to be solved by those techniques, then this is wise. The solutions would have to be valuable to Baidu (presumably, though not necessarily, by being valuable to the customers).
auvi 10y ago
from the article: "while Ctrip.com, the world’s second-largest online travel agent". What is the largest then?
- jumpCastle 10y ago
  priceline 86B$, ctrip 24B$
jotjotzzz 10y ago
Oh, that explains the random Skype hacks, got it. Hate this company already.

72 points by ptrptr 10y ago

alistproducer2 10y ago

I think this reflects Baidu playing catch-up with Google more than the mobile bet bring dead.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

200jin 10y ago

Badidu's slogan: Be the Evil, serve the Evil

johansch 10y ago
I thought that was the slogan of Qihoo 360.

est 10y ago

Background story: Baidu totally missed China's mobile Internet market compared with Tencent or Alibaba. It's so called O2O (a term mostly used by Chinese) market share is burning money. Baidu's dreadful bet is today's AI hype.

yeukhon 10y ago
Tencent's QQ (chat messenger) was the main reason for the success. QQ attracted millions of young users. Within the chat messenger you could play games and eventually blog/personal space, payment, and email were added. This type of product development is extremely common practice in Chinese Internet product. Portal experience and one-stop shop experience are critical UX one must considered in China (and Japan too) to be successful. Baidu made the mistake of advertising itself as a search engine like Google, but failed to compete and catching up in 2000s when other competitors like Tencent was already taking up millions of active users. Yes, Baidu music exists, Baidu Bar (like Yahoo! Answers) also exists, but they are subpar. Regarding to 360, basically back in 2000s, companies realized the best way to sell their product was (1) partnership with computer seller by bundling software just like McAcfee / Norton, and/or (2) provide toolbar so users can access content from the browsers. Tencents and others developed their own forked browsers. Then the era of virus/malware terror plague began as people learned either the software have backdoor (they all do actually), software doing weird things (e.g. system optimizer!), or people downloaded the software from an untrusted source because of piracy and poor Internet safety education (when people are pirating, they go to forums to look for software and if a thread is hot users would click on it and get convinced to try the software - little to their knowledge, most of them have backdoors). 360 was the most popular free anti-virus in China, and the company did a massive marketing campaign and everyone fell for it.

rodorgas 10y ago

I would support an AI solution to make Baidu uninstall possible.

startupdiscuss 10y ago

Q to the community: Should the wisdom of investing in ML depend on the probability of finding problems in that domain that can be solved by: regression, classification, clustering or prediction? So, if Baidu has many problems that are likely (by whatever estimate) to be solved by those techniques, then this is wise. The solutions would have to be valuable to Baidu (presumably, though not necessarily, by being valuable to the customers).

auvi 10y ago

from the article: "while Ctrip.com, the world’s second-largest online travel agent". What is the largest then?

jumpCastle 10y ago
priceline 86B$, ctrip 24B$

jotjotzzz 10y ago

Oh, that explains the random Skype hacks, got it. Hate this company already.