Baidu Says Its New Face Recognition Tech Is Better Than Humans At Checking IDs

"When I go to a Broadway show, I'm not very happy that scalpers have bought up all the tickets," says Andrew Ng, chief scientist of Baidu Research, the Silicon Valley branch of the tech company often described as the Google of China. Baidu has proposed a new artificial intelligence solution not only to thwart scalpers but to speed up the wait at any place where checking tickets or IDs leads to long lines. Today the tech giant announced new face recognition technology that it says is up to 99.77% accurate--able to distinguish people even better than a human can. Baidu published two peer-reviewed research papers and tested the technology using popular methodologies, so it's making more than empty claims. But beyond questions over how and how well these technologies work are questions of how they will be used.