Syarifah Jihan Assiry

29319177

The rapid growth of the internet in China has been propelled by the Chinese government’s push to
develop the country’s information infrastructure and its tight control over the internet. This relationship
has yielded three internet giants—Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent—that stand at the apex of the internet
economy in China.

Baidu
Of all the BAT giants, Baidu was the first to pioneer and apply deep learning, scoring a big win in 2014
with the hire of Andrew Ng to head Baidu’s Silicon Valley AI lab. By 2015, Baidu’s AI algorithms had
already surpassed humans in Chinese speech recognition, a full year before Microsoft achieved the
same feat in English. Fast forward to 2017, and China’s dominant search engine now heads up national
initiatives in AI R&D, driverless vehicles and international open source platforms. Reaching second-
quarter revenues of around 26 billion RMB (nearly $3.8 billion USD), Baidu continues to beat forecasts,
with total revenues increasing 31 percent year on year. Hinted at by a patent published with the U.S.,
China, Europe, South Korea and Japan, Baidu may soon be rolling out a consumer robot equipped with
both voice and facial recognition.

Alibaba
China’s leading e-commerce behemoth, Alibaba has made an unbelievable dent in the Chinese retail and
financial sectors. But the real treasure trove of real-world data lies in Alipay, Alibaba’s mobile payments
platform. While mobile payments make up less than 1 percent of overall in-store transaction volume in
the U.S., they are almost indispensable in China. Working with several local governments, including that
of Macau and Hangzhou, Alibaba is at the forefront of smart cities. Alibaba’s AI cloud platform “ET City
Brain” uses AI algorithms to predict outcomes across traffic management, healthcare and urban
planning, crunching data from cameras, sensors, social media and government data. Aiming to
revolutionize urban management, Alibaba has partnered with Nvidia for its deep-learning-based video
platform for smart city services.

Tencent
To solidify its loyal consumer base, Tencent has become a leader in mobile gaming, owning the wildly
popular League of Legends, played by over 100 million people every month. And now, Tencent is making
extraordinary new inroads in AI-based healthcare disruption under Chinese government leadership.
Most notably, Tencent recently participated in a $154 million mega-round for China-based healthcare AI
unicorn iCarbonX. Hoping to develop a complete digital representation of your biological self, iCarbonX
has acquired numerous American personalized medicine startups. And in addition to Tencent’s own
Miying healthcare AI platform — aimed at assisting healthcare institutions in AI-driven cancer
diagnostics — Tencent is quickly expanding into the drug discovery space, participating in two
multimillion-dollar, U.S.-based AI drug discovery deals just this year.

Final Thoughts
BAT aren’t just revolutionizing these industries on their home turf. They’re bringing enormous sums of
capital and cutting edge technology to startups and markets across the globe. BAT had previously
focused their respective businesses on distinct sectors of the online economy, and the proliferation of
mobile devices in China introduced new territory to be conquered. By the end of 2014, BAT had each
made a series of investments and acquisitions to aggressively compete with each other and with other
competitors in the emerging mobile space.