Baidu's AI Lab Director on Advancing Speech Recognition and Simulation

Adam Coates is the Director of Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab. Craig Cannon [00:00] – Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. This episode is with Adam Coates. Adam's the director of Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab, and what they focus on is developing AI technologies that'll impact at least 100 million people. We spent a good chunk of this episode talking about Adam's work in speech to text and text to speech, so if you want to learn more about those projects, you can check out research.baidu.com, Today we have Adam Coates here for an interview. Adam, you run the AI lab at Baidu, in Silicon Valley. Could you just give us a quick intro and explain with Baidu is for people who don't know? Adam Coates [00:40] – Yeah, Baidu is actually the largest search engine in China. So it turns out the internet ecosystem in China is this incredibly dynamic environment. So Baidu, I think, turned out to be an early technology leader and really established itself in PC search, but then also has remade itself in the mobile revolution, and increasingly, today, is becoming an AI company, recognizing the value of AI for a whole bunch of different applications, not just search.