I'm probably the worst Silicon Valley insider ever. I don't hang out with Silicon Valley people.
To spend time in Silicon Valley in a year of political upheaval is, on one level, soothing. It is pleasant to hear talk of wearables, walled gardens, and disruptive beverages in between updates about mass deportation.
It's important to dabble in things that interest you, and for me, I'm interested in the tech space that is here in Silicon Valley, fashion and golf.
Silicon Valley and Beijing are the leading hubs of AI, followed by the U.K. and Canada. I am seeing a lot of excitement in India, going by the number of people who are taking Coursera courses on AI.
In Silicon Valley, there are a lot of startups using computer vision for agriculture or shopping - there are a lot for clothes shopping. At Baidu, for example, if you find a picture of a movie star, we actually use facial recognition to identify that movie star and then tell you things like their age and hobbies.
Baidu Research has three labs - two in Beijing that are already largely built up, and the Silicon Valley one is being built from scratch. We're hiring pretty rapidly, about one person a week, but we are about a month in, so honestly, we haven't done that much work yet.
Traditionally, we think that people with ideas are innovators - that Silicon Valley is the world of ideas. But within the hedge-fund world, they believe that they are men of ideas - that the trade is unto itself one of ideas.
Silicon Valley is like Wall Street in that it will fill and pursue market opportunities to their logical extremes.
The problems that you see startups tackling are dramatically different in different cities. Silicon Valley is unlikely to produce the same set of companies as New York or Cleveland because the region has a different set of strengths and defining institutions.
Free is really, you know, the gift of Silicon Valley to the world. It's an economic force, it's a technical force. It's a deflationary force, if not handled right. It is abundance, as opposed to scarcity.
