I believe that the ability to innovate and to be creative are teachable processes. There are ways by which people can systematically innovate or systematically become creative.

One thing I've been doing at Baidu is running a workshop on the strategy of innovation. The idea is that innovation is not these random unpredictable acts of genius but that, instead, one can be very systematic in creating things that have never been created before.

AI has been making tremendous progress in machine translation, self-driving cars, etc. Basically, all the progress I see is in specialised intelligence. It might be hundreds or thousands of years or, if there is an unexpected breakthrough, decades.

I joined Baidu in 2014 to work on AI. Since then, Baidu's AI group has grown to roughly 1,300 people, which includes the 300-person Baidu Research. Our AI software is used every day by hundreds of millions of people.

One of the things Baidu did well early on was to create an internal platform that made it possible for any engineer to apply deep learning to whatever application they wanted to, including applications that AI researchers like me would never have thought of.