Checking in with Andrew Ng at Baidu's Blooming Silicon Valley Research Lab

Scatterings of completed buildings, sporting new plantings of drought-tolerant grasses, are already occupied; other buildings are going up quickly, including a new fire station. There's Nissan's new Silicon Valley research center, a well-financed medical device startup called Spiracur, a digital cash startup called Quisk, and a biotech startup incubator. And there is Baidu's Silicon Valley AI Lab--my destination along this dusty road crowded with construction vehicles. It's good to spend time in a new research lab; there's not only fresh paint and hip decor--like living walls of plants--there are fresh, excited faces, and empty desks waiting to be filled. In mid-2014, I spent a morning on just the other side of nearby Moffett Field watching a far more somber group of researchers moving out of a suddenly closed division of Microsoft Research.