Baidu vs Google - Baidu believes that searchers are moving away from text search and that image recognition will be key in the future of search

Bloomberg reports on an interview with Andrew Ng, the chief scientist of Baidu, China’s largest search engine. Andrew Ng, who founded the Google Brain project at Google in 2011 and now is at Baidu, said that Baidu is working on building out a computing cluster that will be 100 times more powerful than what they developed at Google back in 2012 with the Google Brain project.

The Google Brain project was Google’s Deep Learning project that explores artificial intelligence.

Baidu believes that searchers are moving away from text search and that image recognition will be key in the future of search. To do image search and image recognition right, you need a lot more power. Baidu’s CEO said yesterday that within five years “voice and pictures will account for more than half the total” of all searches. To compete with the image search part, you will need better image recognition, which will require more computing power says Ng.

“The bigger you build these things, the better they perform,” said Ng, who was hired by Baidu in May. “Our initial task is to recognize images better, to create computer vision.”