Baidu Heads for Hong Kong Listing
Chinese search engine company Baidu on Thursday said it was seeking as much as $3.6 billion in a secondary listing on the Hong Kong stock exchange.
Nasdaq-listed Baidu, which said in a filing that it plans to sell 95 million shares for as much as HK$295 ($38.01) per share, is set to become the latest Chinese firm to make a secondary offering in the Asian financial hub.
Fellow US-listed tech giant JD.com raised almost $4 billion in a blockbuster Hong Kong offering in 2020, amid a wave of Chinese companies eschewing Wall Street because of rising tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Baidu on Thursday said it intended to use its proceeds from the listing on developing its artificial intelligence and mobile services.
Baidu, founded in 2000, became China's dominant search engine provider after Google was blocked in the country in 2010.
The company has in recent years branched out into services including maps and food delivery, while pouring funds into artificial intelligence applications like autonomous "robotaxis."
Baidu said in its filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission Thursday that its earnings last year had been "significantly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic," resulting in a five percent year-on-year dip in revenue from online marketing services, its largest revenue source.
The company said it plans to set the price for its Hong Kong listing by around March 17.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
AI is the Neat Handwriting of the Illiterate
A model in the hands of someone who has read the filing and walked the plant is a clerk. The same model, speaking for someone who has done neither, is a disguise. On AI slop, phantom citations and factslop, why finish stopped being evidence of work, and the containment layer KXCO built so a machine cannot speak as the institution until a source is attached.
Worthship: Do Not Conform to the Age
Worthship is the older English word for worship, and it means to ascribe worth. Bishop Robert Barron preached Romans 12 on 30 August. This essay follows the text into the prison letters, and puts two questions to a graph: do the four readings of that Sunday agree, and was Paul free or in chains when he wrote about despair?
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