Inside the Chinese Lab That Plans to Rewire the World with AI
Alibaba is investing huge sums in AI research and resources — and it is building tools to challenge Google and Amazon
By Will Knight
The ticket kiosks at Shanghai’s frenetic subway station have a mind of their own.
Walk up to one and state your destination, and it’ll automatically recommend a route before issuing a ticket. It’ll even check your identification (a necessary step in China) by looking at your face. In the interest of reducing the rush-hour stampede, the system is set up to let you find information and buy tickets without pushing a button or talking to a person.
More impressive still, all this happens successfully in the middle of a crowded, noisy station. Each kiosk has to figure out who is speaking to it; zero in on that person’s voice within the crowd; transcribe the incoming speech; parse its meaning; and compare the person’s face against a massive database of photos — all within a few seconds.
To do it, the kiosks use several cutting-edge machine-learning algorithms. The really interesting thing, though, isn’t the algorithms themselves. It’s where they live. All that image processing and speech recognition is served up on demand by a cloud…
