CHENNAI: Robin Li, Co-founder and CEO of Chinese search engine company Baidu, believes that artificial intelligence will pare human dependence on mobile phones as a combination of sensor-driven infrastructure and advanced programming will create an environment of voice-and-visual dominated interface, reducing the need to use mobile devices.
“At homes, we already have an experience that’s different from today’s mobile internet. So, if you want to get the weather report from your mobile, you have to do a set of actions like opening your phone, finding the right app and so on… In voice-first devices, it’s much more direct and convenient, and the barrier to entry is lower. You don’t even have to be literate.. Because of this, over the next ten years, we will be less dependent on mobile phones; less and less…” Li said in a talk that he gave at IIT-Madras. Li was in India for the Spotlight Lecture Series organised as part of IIT-M’s technology symposium Shaastra.
Li, a computer scientist and one of China’s celebrated Internet entrepreneurs, co-founded Baidu, which went public in 2005. The company, which posted its first loss in May last year since going public, is facing severe competition from the short-video company ByteDance.
Li also said the video as a form of content was gaining prominence, and may become the numero uno form of content: “Video is becoming the main form of content. We used to see text; then more and more images on the Internet. Today, video is the most important form of content on the internet. People’s mindsets are also changing– changing toward video content.”
The other trends that Li envisages are advancements in a range of industries from pharmaceuticals, where AI can speed up drug discovery, to banking, where virtual assistants can now help people create bank accounts, borrow money and so on.
Another area where AI was making strides is transportation, where Baidu’s open source platform for autonomous driving is being used by many ecosystem partners including Mercedes Benz, Toyota and others to create solutions. AI, Li said, has already made a significant contribution to finding missing persons through its face recognition and prediction capabilities. Li said Baidu has over 2,000 engineers working on it AI platform.
Li spoke about a concept he referred to as “immortality through AI.” As data storage turns cheaper, tonnes of information about a person can be collected and stored, creating space for interpretation about how a person would think or react in a certain situation: “For example, my speech here can be videotaped. Your voice, video, texts, articles, everything about you can be digitised. So after a while, it is not hard to imagine when Tim Cook [ Apple Inc’s CEO] wants to evaluate whether Apple should work on an autonomous driving project, he can actually ask Steve Jobs — the digital copy of Steve Jobs.”
Li said computers can learn how a person thinks by trawling through information about them, making them, in a way, immortal. “Not just Jobs; every one- if information is stored and made available whenever necessary- can be made immortal,” Li told students of IIT Madras.
Li said India was one of the fastest-growing smartphone market in the world, witnessing fast growth over the last few decades, much similar to China, and that he was “looking forward to working with Indian Institutions” in the future.
Source: Economic Times