Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

Baidu is a technology-based enterprise. From the search engine era to the AI era, it has experienced several ups and downs of the Internet, but it has not changed.

Just recently, Wang Haifeng, former senior vice president of Baidu and head of AI Technology platform system (AIG) and basic Technology system (TG), was appointed Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Baidu Group on May 31, 2019. In the past ten years, this big technology factory finally has CTO again.

Since taking the lead in raising artificial intelligence to the company's strategy, how to tamp the technology base and release technology potential energy has become another important proposition for Baidu. In terms of organizational structure, we are trying to adjust in 2018 or even earlier. An important node is last year's smart cloud organization upgrade and technology platform integration. The focus of the adjustment has two points: first, the smart cloud business department (ACU) will be upgraded to smart cloud business group (ACG), which will host both AI to B and cloud business development. Second, the operation and maintenance, infrastructure and group-level shared platforms of the search company and each BG are integrated into the basic technology system (TG), and the integrated TG reports to Wang Haifeng. In an internal letter, Robin Li, founder, chairman and CEO of Baidu, said the move was to "speed up the integration of AI with industry, promote the process of industrial intelligence, and enhance the core advantages of the group's technology platform".

Now, with the landing of CTO, which has been vacant for many years, we can also roughly see that the tamping of the technology chassis is also increasing in the process of Baidu's AI strategy for more than three years. In this process, the story of a technology company's "self-evolution" is gradually taking shape.

Improving the efficiency of heavy troops: what has the technical organizational structure changed?

Large companies will inevitably have the problem of "remaking wheels", and technology is no exception. And technological resources, for Internet companies, technology enterprises, can be regarded as the underlying resources. "the management of machines, the use of machine resources, the allocation of machines, and the scheduling of machines, these really expensive things, as long as these capabilities at the bottom are tamped and achieved very low costs, this infrastructure alone can make a lot of money." An engineer doing basic technology at Baidu introduced it to the author.

Baidu these rounds of organizational structure adjustment, there is no doubt that the goal is one: to improve efficiency. The extensive application of deep learning framework PaddlePaddle within Baidu is a case in point-it is also the only Chinese deep learning framework in the Chinese market that can compete with Google's TensorFlow and Facebook's PyTorch. "in fact, people who do technology have a high IQ and generally think highly of themselves, and many people are unwilling to use what others do. I can understand this mentality. In fact, we all know that this is inefficient." A programmer told me that when the company is bigger and there are many technicians, this kind of "repetitive wheel" is inevitable, but in addition to wasting resources, it is not conducive to making really good things, nor is it conducive to unified adjustment and improvement in the future. " The company has a very good sense of evolution. PaddlePaddle is a good example. There were other platforms, but now basically the whole computing platform related to AI will be output through PaddlePaddle, which I think is very right. "

In the process of the increasingly clear technical organization structure, there are still many measures to improve efficiency, such as PaddlePaddle. The Spring Festival Gala war is not only a victory, but also another integration of internal technical resources and upgrading of technical capabilities. All this has greatly accelerated the pace of intelligence of Baidu's own business, and now Baidu Maps, information flow and intelligent cloud have all completed intelligent upgrades.

It is not difficult to find that with the gradual clarity of the technical organization structure, Baidu has opened a green channel, allowing low-level resources such as manpower, computing power, data and so on to be transferred to the R & D port, and after the shells are made, they can concentrate their firepower on solving the problems in the application scene.

The growth of technology-based enterprises is not easy, and the development of technology itself never stops. The belief in technology and the firmness in strategy are the driving force of a technology enterprise's self-evolution.

The hematopoietic secret of "technology responsibility": from newcomers to Daniel, what do technical people get from Baidu?

If it is said that Baidu continues to adjust its architecture to accelerate the efficiency of technology research and development, it is the technology craving brought about by today's intelligent tide. Then Baidu's internal self-driving force comes from the technological culture that has been adhered to within the enterprise.

Technology can be developed, bought and sold, and passed on, but when technology is integrated into culture, it really forms a steady stream of competitiveness. When it comes to this topic, an engineer who has worked at Baidu for many years told us that he thinks Baidu is a very suitable enterprise for the growth of technical talents, which can give a lot of things to technical talents and make ta grow from a newcomer to Daniel. " That's why many things that are too cutting-edge or at the bottom can only be done by Baidu-everyone is short of talent, especially AI talent is so short of demand that new people can't do it for a long time. But Baidu has such a 'field' that allows technical personnel to grow up rapidly in our system. "

As for what Baidu has given to these technical people, the engineer concluded: first, technical personnel can gain a strong "sense of respect" in Baidu, unlike in many enterprises, technicians are "pointing and bossing around." in Baidu, technical personnel have a stronger dominant position. Second, Baidu has its own system for the training of technical talents, and the mechanism of "passing, helping and guiding" is very mature, and there will always be people to help you think about what problems should be solved at different career stages. "Ta's technical mentors and direct leaders will be particularly concerned about what stage Ta should reach and how to grow. So as long as technical personnel work hard, they are basically on a good path of progress."

This talent training mechanism and technical culture have not only trained many top technical experts in Baidu, but also attracted Dr. Huanjun, Dr. Kenneth Church and other world-class scientists to join Baidu Research Institute. Such a well-functioning technical personnel "hematopoiesis" mechanism, may be Baidu as China's Internet "technology to take on" the real secret.

A Spring Festival red packet campaign, and the answer to Baidu's technological evolution

So what will happen when the technological culture grows in the transformation of the technological organizational structure at the same time?

This question can be answered by Baidu's "Spring Festival Red packet campaign".

During the 2019 Spring Festival, Baidu, as the exclusive online interactive platform for the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, launched a nearly 10-day red packet marketing war based on Baidu App and Baidu products. The results show that not only the DAU of Baidu products has soared, but also the number of users of Baidu products has increased massively before the Spring Festival, and even Apple's Appstore has been "bullied".

But behind the achievements, there is a difficult technological battle. On the one hand, Baidu technicians have to face the harsh application environment in which huge user traffic broke out instantly during the Spring Festival Gala; on the other hand, it is a complex development task: Baidu Spring Festival red envelope project includes 10 products and platforms, 110 + scenarios, more than 100 teams participate, need thousands of people to cooperate, with an average of more than 1000 new requirements and tasks per day, and tens of thousands of automated tests. Being able to accomplish this task perfectly means strong collaboration, including collaboration from front-end business to back-end technical resources, and collaboration between technical personnel in different departments. In April this year, the Seventh Baidu Technology Open Day was held in Zhongguancun with the theme of "revealing the technology behind the red packets of the Spring Festival Gala". A number of Baidu technology bulls explained in detail the technical details behind the red packets of the Spring Festival Gala from three aspects: the optimal design of Baidu's whole system link, the escort of excellent technology accumulation, and the guarantee of large-scale engineering capacity. The story is thrilling, but for every technician involved in this battle, it must be more self-confidence and a sense of achievement.

This also shows that with a clear technical structure and a clear technical culture, it means that the mobilization and cooperation of resources and personnel within the enterprise will be more simple and efficient, and it will also enable Baidu to "concentrate its efforts on doing great things".

Born to the future: building up the momentum for the tide of industrial intelligence

Whether it is the adjustment of technical organizational structure and personnel, the integration of resources, or the persistence of technological culture, all show that Baidu is saving energy for the intelligent tide surging in the future.

After artificial intelligence has been written into national strategies by governments in the past few years, the development trend of artificial intelligence is becoming more and more clear this year. In 2019, "Smart +" was included in the government's national report for the first time. From artificial intelligence to intelligence +, we are constantly making it clear that artificial intelligence needs to be landed and combined with industry in order to release value.

The adjustments made by Baidu in recent years are also constantly adapting to this demand.

Only by clarifying their own technology research and development channels and establishing the core concept of technology first, can the "shells" be continuously transported to the "front line".

At the beginning of the development of industrial intelligence, what various industries need is rich technological basic tools to adapt to different application scenarios, different enterprise development scales and stages, and different technologies. This puts forward higher requirements for the R & D efficiency of technology-based enterprises like Baidu.

In the process of constantly adjusting the technology organization structure, Baidu is also constantly evolving into a "technology-oriented" enterprise, successively opening up UNIT, PaddlePaddle, Apollo, small assistant and other open platforms for important fields, and then to the establishment of the first Huangpu College to train Chinese AI architects, are constantly paving the way for enabling developers and enabling industries. Another example is Baidu brain's automated deep learning tool AutoDL, which took only three months to launch.

It is believed that in the future, industrial intelligence will give rise to more and more demand for technology tools. Baidu's previous accumulation and experience will make it an important promoter in the era of industrial intelligence.

Concluding remarks

In more than ten days, the 2019 Baidu AI developer Conference will be held. In the information we have revealed so far, we have found an interesting detail: in the open course session of the conference, there are more than 30 open courses and manual labs, covering deep learning, Mini Program cloud development, quantum computing and many other technical areas. Compared with previous AI developer conferences, Baidu has created a "mini campus" this year.

It can be seen that Baidu's technology output is becoming more and more meticulous and in-depth, not only self-adjusting to meet the needs of industrial intelligence, but also constantly increasing in developer empowerment.

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