Baidu chasing Google in race to create real AI

Michael A Osborne, associate professor in machine learning at the University of Oxford, shares a similar view.

"The DeepMind team has made amazing advances at the frontiers of deep learning and reinforcement learning. Nonetheless, I think all at DeepMind would recognize the substantial challenges that remain in developing full AI.

"We're still far from being able to reproduce in software the deep understanding of our environments, like societal norms and cultural cues, that comes naturally to us given only limited examples," he says.

Just as Google positions itself as an AI company, China's search engine giant Baidu is also investing heavily in AI development.

Since 2013, Baidu has been working on a cutting-edge project Baidu Brain. With a strong research and development team, the project uses computer to simulate human brain and has achieved the intelligence level of a three-year-old.

In 2014, Baidu poured 7 billion yuan - 15 percent of its total revenues - into R&D. Last year, registered patents of Baidu also soared to nearly 2,000 items, up 146 percent compared with the previous year. And 25.4 percent is relevant to AI, including 270 items in Neuro-Linguistic Programming and 120 in Deep Learning.

"China's AI research and development does not lag far behind those in developed countries," said Baidu CEO Robin Li at the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

Baidu's Deep Speech can recognize speech in noisy surroundings like in a restaurant as often as 81 percent, higher than the 65 percent of other commercial speech-recognition application programming interfaces, according to a Forbes report.

Another major breakthrough for Baidu last year was to develop software that can describe a picture with languages. This technology will allow people to search for pictures with oral instructions, and will especially benefit the blind.

Based on its R&D, Baidu is developing applications including Baidu Magic Mirror, Carlife, self-driving cars and robots.

When you get up in the morning and look into the magic mirror, it will tell you what to do with your face - shave or apply cosmetics. You can also read the news on it.

When you need to go out, Carlife will tell you the best way to travel to your desired location and point out the best parking lot. The self-driving car will ferry you to the location. You can take the robot with you so that it will help you deal with various information and work and chat with or entertain you.

Life could seem much easier in the future, especially for people with disabilities.