Bloomberg has reported on an interview with Andrew Ng, the chief Scientist of China’s largest search engine, Baidu. Andrew Ng had founded the Google Brain project back in 2011 when he was with Google, and is now at Baidu, he is working on a computing cluster that will be 100 times more powerful than the Google Brain project.
For those who don’t know what the Google Brain project is, it was a Deep Learning project that explores artificial intelligence. This doesn’t have Skynet written anywhere on this, I promise (hopefully).
In the eyes of Baidu, searchers of the future will have moved away from text search, and will have embraced image recognition as the search of the future. Because of the belief, it will take a lot more power. This increase in power will make image search and recognition work correctly. The CEO of Baidu had this to say:
Within five years, “voice and pictures will account for more than half the total” of all searches.
Ng said that for image search to work, image recognition is key, and that means more computing power is needed. “The bigger you build these things, the better they perform. Our initial task is to recognize images better, to create computer vision.”