Time Asia cover labels Baidu's Li 'The Innovator'

Li said Baidu can take China's unparalleled scale advantage to dominate global AI market. The reason is that the more the data, the better trained the algorithm.

Currently, Baidu has devoted lots to autonomous driving and voice recognition, and developed autonomous driving platform Apollo and conversational AI platform DuerOS.

The largest search engine in China launched its autopilot vehicle Apollo 2.0 at the 2018 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Jan 8. The system can help realize auto drive on barrier-lesscity roads.

"AI is changing the world, China Speed", said Lu Qi, COO of Baidu, who showed Baidu's autonomous driving vehicles via a video presentation at the CES.

And artificial voice recognition technology at the DuerOS can understand what people say, sometimes even better than a human being,according to Baidu.

"We imagine that humans can interact with any equipment using human languages," said Li. "In the future, the tools will study how to understand human language and human intentions. That's the future."

While Tesla's founder Elon Musk and physicist Stephen Hawking both claimed that AI is a big threat to human society, Li said: "Human owns the ability of making the world a safe place to live in. The nuclear weapons kill many people, but we can control this weapon. The true function of the weapon is to end the World War II, and they don't trigger a new world war."

The development of AI will undoubtedly make many people lose their jobs. "You can't change the development trend, what you can do is to go on pursuing innovation to create more jobs for people," said Li.