Google Is Already Late to China's AI Revolution

Sitting on a stage in Wuzhen, China, a historic city up the river from Shanghai, Google chairman Eric Schmidt described what he called "the age of intelligence." He trumpeted the rise of deep neural networks and other techniques that allow machines to learn tasks largely on their own, either by finding patterns in vast amounts of data or through their own trial and error. At Google, using a sweeping software tool called TensorFlow, engineers have built deep learning systems that can identify faces and objects in photos, recognize commands spoken into smartphones, and translate one language into another. Schmidt called this the biggest technological change of his lifetime. Then he mentioned China's three largest internet companies: Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba.