Andrew Ng is hunched over his smartphone, in a pantomime of key-pecking, squinting, typo-ridden discomfort. “This is how we do it today,” he says.吴恩达(Andrew Ng)驼着背低着头，散发出滑稽地在他的智能手机上比划着不时页面屏幕、眯着眼却依然错字连篇的那种懊恼的样子。“我们如今是这样做到的，”他称之为。

“And this is how we should be doing it,” says the chief scientist for Baidu, China’s largest search engine. He sits back in his chair, speaking to no one in particular with his phone placed on the table. The one-finger typing agony of millions of smartphone users should one day become a thing of the past, he says. All it would take is the creation of a reasonably accurate, pocket-sized electronic version of a human brain.“而我们应当这样做到，”这位百度(Baidu)的首席科学家称之为。他靠在座位上，没特定对象地说道着话，手机放到桌子上。

他说道，数百万智能手机用户用一个手指敲打字的伤痛有一天应当沦为过去。而这只必须建构一种超过合理精确度、与口袋大小非常的电子版人类大脑。百度是中国仅次于的搜索引擎。Mr Ng is an expert in deep learning, a branch of artificial intelligence that focus on teaching computers how to talk, listen, read, and think like us. The area is fast becoming a priority for the world’s biggest technology companies, including Baidu as it tackles the era of the mobile internet.吴恩达是深度自学(deep learning)领域的专家，该领域是人工智能的一个分支，专心于让计算机自学如何像我们一样听得、说道、读书、思。

由于该领域与移动互联网时代密切连接，它于是以很快沦为还包括百度在内的全球仅次于科技公司的优先发展领域。“The whole world is switching to mobile devices but no one has created a usable interface to input into the devices,” he says. With the development of artificial intelligence, “soon you’ll be able to order food and just say ‘Can I have some food delivered to my house before I get home?’ out loud.”“整个世界都在改向移动设备，但是还没有人建构出向移动设备输出指令的简单模块，”他称之为。随着人工智能的发展，“迅速你将可以在采购食物时只必须大声说一句‘能在我回家前送来些食物到我家中吗？’”“It won’t even feel like technology, it will just be in the background.”“感觉上甚至都不看起来科技，而就在后台里。

”In addition to better voice recognition, AI is being talked about for any number of uses from predicting advertising clicks to recognising faces.除了更佳的语音辨识，从预测广告点击量到人脸识别技术的很多领域都在辩论用于人工智能。Since joining Baidu last year, Mr Ng has been steadily working to implement this vision. A UK native with Chinese roots, he founded in 2011 Google Brain, the US technology company’s deep learning project, and led it until he joined the Chinese company last year. Poaching him was regarded as a coup in the technology world.自从去年重新加入百度以来，吴恩达仍然在为构建这个愿景而稳扎稳打。作为一名出生于在英国的华人，他在2011年创立了“谷歌大脑”(Google Brain)——谷歌的深度自学项目，并且在去年重新加入百度前仍然领导着该项目。百度扫帚回头吴恩达被指出是科技界的一次政变。

He describes the advanced computers at Baidu’s Sunnyvale, California, lab as “rocket engines” whose software can be taught to mimic the functioning of the human mind. Their “fuel” is data, which he gets from Baidu’s trove of online video and audio output as he works to teach the electronic brain to listen and speak.他把百度坐落于加州森尼韦尔(Sunnyvale)实验室中的先进设备计算机比作“火箭引擎”，计算机中的软件可以自学仿真人类思想的功能。在吴恩达教电子大脑听得和说道时，它们的“燃料”就是他从百度在线视频和音频输入资料库中获得的数据。The company has an advantage in deep-learning algorithms for speech recognition in that most video and audio in China is accompanied by text — nearly all news clips, television shows and films are close-captioned and almost all are available to Baidu and Iqiyi, its video affiliate.百度在语音辨识深度自学算法方面具备优势，因为中国大多数视频和音频都常有文本——完全所有新闻剪辑、电视节目及电影都有详尽的字幕，而百度及其视频子公司爱人奇艺(Iqiyi)可以取得完全所有此类内容。

While a typical academic project uses 2,000 hours of audio data to train voice recognition, says Mr Ng, the troves of data available to China’s version of Google mean he is able to use 100,000 hours.吴恩达说道，一个典型的学术项目不会利用2000小时的音频数据来训练语音辨识，但百度——中国版谷歌——享有的可观数据库意味著他可以利用10万小时。He declines to specify just how much the extra 98,000 hours improves the accuracy of his project, but insists it is vital.他拒绝接受详尽解释额外9.8万小时在多大程度上提高了其项目的精确度，但否认这至关重要。“A lot of people underestimate the difference between 95 per cent and 99 per cent accuracy. It’s not an ‘incremental’ improvement of 4 per cent; it’s the difference between using it occasionally versus using it all the time,” he says.“许多人高估了95%精确度与99%精确度之间的区别。

这不是4%的“增量”提高；这是有时候用于与一直用于之间的区别，”他说道。Thanks to the strides made in Chinese language voice recognition — a particular challenge because of the number of homonyms and the importance of context — Baidu will soon roll out Deepspeech, a voice recognition software similar to Apple’s Siri.由于在汉语语音辨识方面获得了巨大进步（汉语中的大量同音异义词和语境的重要性使之极具挑战），百度将要发售Deepspeech——一款类似于苹果(Apple)的Siri的语音辨识软件。Other Chinese companies including Alibaba and Tencent are also making advances in AI, but thanks largely to Mr Ng’s reputation Baidu is now judged by industry experts to be ahead of its domestic peers, ranking up alongside US rivals Facebook, Google, and IBM.还包括阿里巴巴(Alibaba)、腾讯(Tencent)在内的其他中国企业在人工智能方面也获得了变革，但主要归功于吴恩达的声望，行业专家如今指出百度要领先于国内同行，可与美国竞争对手Facebook、谷歌和IBM媲美。

“Artificial intelligence is an oligopoly,” says Yang Jing, founder of AI Era, an association for the artificial intelligence industry in China. “It’s a game for the titans.”“人工智能是寡头垄断行业，”中国人工智能行业协会新的智元(AI Era)创始人杨静说道，“这是一个巨头间的游戏。”Baidu already saves Rmb17m ($2.7m) per day at its data centres by using deep-learning algorithms to predict hard drive malfunctions, and it is also using AI to optimise the use of advertisements and photos to improve clickthrough rates. It would not reveal how much it is spending on AI development overall.百度通过在数据中心利用深度自学算法预测硬盘故障早已可以每天节省1700万元人民币（合270万美元），而且还利用人工智能优化广告和相片的用于来提高点击率。

该公司未透漏在人工智能研发上总计投放多少资金。But in spite of lofty long-term ambitions, translating deep learning into money-making projects is still largely on the horizon.尽管雄心勃勃，但要将深度自学转变成赚的项目仍有很长一段路要回头。Mr Ng is undaunted. “There’s no question that [AI] is creating huge economic value; there’s no question that this will continue to create huge advances,” he says. “There is still a huge gap between the way machines learn and the way humans learn.”吴恩达没什么惧怕。

“毫无疑问，（人工智能）正在建构极大的经济价值；毫无疑问，这将之后建构极大的变革，”他说道，“机器的自学方式与人类的自学方式之间仍不存在极大差距。

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