Baidu suffers another blow to AI efforts, thanks to Tencent

• Tencent has poached Tong Zhang, who heads up Baidu’s Big Data Lab, it announced. Tong will head Tencent’s own AI lab, which was established last year.
• This is another setback for Baidu’s AI research efforts. It lost Andrew Ng, its chief scientist who was previously from Google. Andrew was the founder of Google Brain, the search company’s deep learning research project.
• “Tencent is looking at four areas for AI application: content, social, online games and cloud services. At present, over a hundred Tencent products, including Weixin/WeChat, QQ and Tian Tian Kuai Bao, a Tencent news app, use AI technology,” the company said.

Source: TechCrunch

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