The Mobile Internet Is Over. Baidu Goes All In on AI

This marathon carried on for 15 hours a day for an entire month. Clients that supplied the material received professional-grade Chinese versions of the originals at a bargain price. But Baidu Inc., the Beijing-based company that organized the mass translation, got something potentially more valuable: millions of English-Mandarin word pairs with which to train its online translation engine. China is infamous for its knockoffs, whether luxury handbags or web startups. But the country's leadership seems to understand that when it comes to artificial intelligence, cheap imitations just won't do--not when its rivals include Alphabet, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft.