Baidu continues to bet on AI.

On November 28th, On the baidu Education grand ceremony, Zhang Gao, general manager of Baidu Education Business Division, officially released “Baidu Education Brain 3.0”. It is reported that the 3.0 version will further upgrade AI core capabilities such as content resources, knowledge graph and intelligent interaction. Meanwhile, educational AI capabilities will be fully opened to partners.

Dr. Zhang Yaqin, president of Baidu, said at the conference that “intelligence + education” will accelerate industrial evolution, and artificial intelligence will open a new era of education, an era of increasing efficiency of knowledge transmission.

At this point, Baidu Education Division in the establishment of less than three years, has been a lot of harvest. Zhang Gao, general manager of Baidu Education Business Division, introduced that Baidu Education Brain 3.0 enabled Baidu education SaaS platform has 700 million monthly active users, 8 million teachers, more than 10 million education members… It has become the largest education SaaS service platform in China.

The rapid growth of Baidu Education from 0 to 1 and then to 10 not only shows us baidu’s incubation and organizational ability as an Internet giant.

From digitization to AI-driven, The development of Baidu education is extremely optimistic, but it has been cultivating this land of education, but there are still many “potholes”.

Potholes in the education industry: lack of “power platform”, top-heavy technology, unbalanced resources

K12 online education and smart education have been very popular in the past two years, thanks to the continuous support of capital. But behind these positive events, the education industry still has “unspeakable” pain.

First, the lack of “power platform” in the industry. Although many traditional education giants have long started online and technological transformation and upgrading, there is still no professional platform that can be empowered with large scope and high precision. Second, technology is “top-heavy”, and technological advantages are often in the hands of giants. As a result, when technology is used to empower the education industry, the head platform frequently acts, but the long-tail platform is often “willing but weak”. Third, the tilted “balance” of resources. In the traditional education period, the regional imbalance of educational resources is very obvious.

These problems are old problems in the education industry. Baidu Education, which started more than two years ago, must be well aware of them. Then, what kind of logic does baidu Education use to solve these problems in the “AI” -centered education ecosystem it has built? What is the driving force of AI?

Baidu Education’s “AI method” : To create a new education ecology

Review baidu education brain of these several upgrades, you can find a law. Baidu education brain from 1.0 to 2.0 and then to 3.0, is the route of technological ladder, can be said to be from simple to complex, from easy to difficult. Based on this, Baidu education has created a “super education ecology”.

First, from the perspective of content resources. In the 1.0 era, Baidu completed the digitization project of hundreds of millions of contents through digitization capability, which is the starting point of content set by Baidu for itself. But more than that, Baidu Education is still accumulating content at a high rate as it continues to recruit partners, such as other education companies and teachers. For example, there are currently 92,000 certified teachers contributing high-quality content on Baidu’s education platform.

According to the latest data of Baidu Education Brain, the platform contains 270 million content documents, more than 200,000 legitimate books, 100% coverage of top-grade books, more than 50,000 sets of audiobooks, more than 8 million high-quality audio, 47 million high-quality teaching resources and tens of millions of new curriculum label attached subject resources.

This is a world-class library of massive resources, but AI can not be difficult. On the one hand, with the combined force of ABC technology (A for AI, B for big data and C for cloud computing), Baidu Education can provide personalized content resources to users such as teachers, students and schools, and enhance the ability of resource supply and demand connection in terms of efficiency and accuracy. On the other hand, through AI, Baidu Education can improve its ability to deal with partners and integrate resources in terms of resource input.

There is a very interesting statistic about the effects of AI-driven resources. According to Baidu Education, its content production partners’ share from Baidu Education doubled from 2017. Obviously, this is due to improved matching accuracy and efficiency, and AI is undoubtedly behind this.

Second, from the perspective of solutions. A key focus of this 3.0 update is to open up educational AI capabilities to the industry. Baidu Education did so, in fact, it is not difficult to understand, on the one hand, Baidu Education after more than two years of trial, has the ability to output standardized solutions to the industry, and on the other hand, Baidu education through such one-stop empowerment, to improve the ecology of the whole industry.

In baidu Education’s view, there are two directions to provide solutions: one is as a SaaS service provider, Baidu Education will output AI technology capabilities to partners; the other is as a resource platform, Baidu Education will output comprehensive resource services to partners.

The value of AI in providing technical solutions or integrated resource services can be explained in two dimensions. One is the value of AI driving the shaping and output of “solutions”, and the other is the value of AI itself as an important technology to export.

Third, from the perspective of platform ecology. Baidu Education uses the title of “Baidu Education Brain 3.0” because it takes AI as the core driving the entire platform.

Whether it is ai-driven resource utilization or AI-driven solutions, it means that AI is the most important and important capability of Baidu Education. So how does AI drive baidu education, a huge resource combined with complex technology, to become a “giant”?

Can be seen from the macro and micro aspects. From a micro point of view, Baidu Education can use AI to recommend the learning content that users are interested in, that is, AI personalized service capability. On the macro level, Baidu Education can use AI to mobilize the supply-demand relationship of the whole platform and fully improve the efficiency of the whole platform.

In summary, the ecology of Baidu education now has emerged very clearly in front of the. To put it simply, AI is the “CPU” of this ecology. Based on ABC technology, Baidu Education can not only efficiently mobilize and match resources, but also provide solutions for other roles in the industry. In this way, Baidu education seems to have been called an “education whole industry chain” ecology.

Leveraging AI, Baidu Education to be industry “accelerator” and “balancer”

Baidu is enamored of AI, it is no secret. Now, the release of “Baidu Education Brain 3.0” has upgraded AI’s capabilities and strategic position again. What can be determined is that Baidu education should also use AI to do a career.

This undertaking, on the one hand, involves the “wisdom” of the whole education industry, on the other hand, it involves the balance of resources of the education industry.

In terms of wisdom, Baidu Education itself has actually done a lot of things. For example, its partners and users who use services on its platform have actually been in the “smart education ecology” constructed by Baidu. For example, at the education ceremony, Baidu also officially announced that The Xiongan Baiyangdian High School, China’s first AI experimental school, jointly built by Baidu, the Wisdom Research Institute of Beijing Normal University and Baiyangdian Senior High School, has been officially launched. It seems that Baidu is ready to land more educational scenes.

Further backward, with the continuous expansion of baidu education’s ecosystem in content resources, partners, users and other aspects, the influence of the ecosystem will continue to expand. This will make Baidu education AI education radiation to more people and institutions, obviously this is a universal nature of the matter.

Moreover, looking at the influence of AI on the industry, many facts have proved that AI’s disruption to the industry will be permanent and unobtainable. At present, Baidu Education has played an extremely important role as an industrial enabler in the big ecosystem it has built. This means that with the further evolution of AI, Baidu Education will become an “accelerator” in the upgrading of intelligence and cloud in the education industry.

In terms of promoting education equity, it is reported that Baidu Charity and Baidu Education will donate smart classroom services to 10,000 schools in remote areas for one year in the future. This move is undoubtedly intended to make use of its technology and platform capabilities to remedy the “resource imbalance” in education.

From the perspective of the balance of resources, this approach will help enrich the teaching ability in remote areas, and the real benefit will be students, teachers and schools in remote areas. Second, it can also promote the thinking of education reform in remote areas, so as to help them have a long-term thinking of reform, which is actually the most crucial point. In short, in this process, Baidu education will become an important “equalizer” of educational resources.

If the past two years, baidu education focus is “ecological”. Therefore, baidu Education, now “moving towards AI”, obviously has a new goal: to take AI as the cornerstone to help the education industry release more reform and transformation potential.

Article/Liu Kuang public number, ID: Liukuang110, this article first kuang Venture capital network