双语阅读英语外刊精讲：李彦宏登上时代周刊

2019-04-24 09:08:00来源：酷学英语

　　When Robin Li looks back at the question now, he can laugh. But things were different in 1992, when the Baidu CEO was a tongue-tied Chinese student applying for a computer-graphics graduate program in the U.S. The interviewing professor asked him, “Do you have computers in China?” It left the young man stunned. “I was very embarrassed,” says Li, 49, breaking into a grin from the penthouse office of his Beijing headquarters. “I thought, one day I’ll demonstrate that China has a really powerful computer industry.”

　　Eight years later, he did. In 2000, Li founded Baidu, a search engine that today is second only to Google in popularity, and whose 80% market share in China makes it the world’s fourth most popular website. The company, whose name derives from a 13th century Chinese poem, has grown into a $60 billion behemoth rivaled in China only by social-media-focused conglomerate Tencent and Jack Ma’s online shopping empire Alibaba. Baidu Maps directs every Chinese motorist, Baidu search results enlighten every student. Nobody is asking Robin Li if computers exist in China any more.

　　China has now set its sights on the next tech frontier: artificial intelligence. At November’s Artificial Intelligence and Global Security Summit in Washington, Eric Schmidt, then executive chairman of Google parent Alphabet, predicted China’s AI prowess will overtake the U.S. within a decade. “By 2030, they will dominate the industries of AI,” he said.

　　No one in China takes this challenge more seriously than Robin Li. Some $1.2 billion of his firm’s $9 billion revenue over the first three-quarters of 2017 was put back into R&D, according to published accounts–much of it into AI. He believes Baidu can dominate the global market for AI by harnessing China’s greatest advantage: scale. Li says, “Everyone speaks the same language; they all obey the same law.”

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