'Chinese Google' Opens Artificial-Intelligence Lab in Silicon Valley

The brick office building sits next to a strip mall in Cupertino, California, about an hour south of San Francisco, and if you walk inside, you'll find a California state flag and a cardboard cutout of R2-D2 and plenty of Christmas decorations -- even though we're well into April. But there are big plans for this building. It's where Baidu -- "the Google of China" -- hopes to create the future. In late January, word arrived that the Chinese search giant was setting up a research lab dedicated to "deep learning" -- an emerging computer science field that seeks to mimic the human brain with hardware and software -- and as it turns out, this lab includes an operation here in Silicon Valley, not far from Apple headquarters, in addition to a facility back in China. The company just hired its first researcher in Cupertino, with plans to bring in several more by the end of the year.